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Sleepy Snake Eats Mischievous Mouse

Fascinating footage taken with time lapse photography... A hapless tree teeming with squirrels... Doomed lemmings... kind of looks like they're running off a Marshmellow Peep Nail Fungus Yes, those are sleep fungi underneath the nail More great footage here or buy your own here at the Mochimochi store.

Higher taxes may not curb some CO2 emissions

For air travelers, a carbon tax won't make them stay home. This is bad news. Can someone please invent a fuel-cell-powered jet? A preview of the computer jet-setters won't be allowed to buy. How hallucinogens work. Plato thought writing would destroy memory. What will digital camcorders do?

Spider spiral

This beautiful photo by Kindra Clineff catches nature one-upping human craftsmanship. I can just hear that spider piping "neener neener neener". Also, it's a perfect follow-up to Christobal Vila's graceful animation about math in nature, which has now officially gone spiral-viral. Buy a print here. Via NOTCOT.

Money can buy happiness... if you spend it on other people

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." - Douglas Adams In this pithy paragraph, the sorely missed Douglas Adams sums up a puzzling paradox of modern life - we often link happiness to money and the spending of it, even though both proverbs and psychological surveys…

Truth is pain…a poll

Apparently still smarting from the trouncing Catholics received from Hitchens and Fry, a site called Catholic Truth Scotland is trying to recoup some dignity…by running an online poll? We could tell them that that won't work. The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world True [70.6%] False [29.4%] I fear those numbers are about to change in a way that will make them very unhappy.

Randy Olson's new blog: The Benshi

Happy New Year and welcome to this new "on-line journal" which will be a collection of essays. It will be sort of a continuation of thoughts from my book, "Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style." In the essays, which will be roughly twice a week, I will be making reference to parts of the book from time to time. Check it out

Draw a Pig Personality Test

This is an online personality test, based on your drawing of a pig. I wanted to save my picture of a pig to share with you because I thought it was rather nice, especially considering that it was drawn online and freehand. Unfortunately, this site does not keep your picture available for very long after you've finished drawing it so be sure to "grab" it before it goes away forever. I'll show you my results if you show me yours! Ho-hum, inaccurate as usual, but I'll spare you the details. . tags: online quiz, personality test, draw a pig

Science 2.0 article quotes four ScienceOnline'09 participants

Science 2.0: New online tools may revolutionize research quotes Michael Nielsen, Eva Amsen, Corie Lok and Jean-Claude Bradley. Article is good but short. If you come to ScienceOnline'09 or participate virtually, you can get the longer story straight from them.

OK, maybe you can turn video games into art

This is a thoughtful contemplation of online personas and what they mean to people. It also has some useful implications: "What will happen if Dublin is invaded by zombies?", indeed. I worry about that all the time. Avatar Days from Piranha Bar on Vimeo.

Senator Obama on Detroit

Senator Obama earned a lot of points in my book today because he took the leadership of the U.S. auto companies to task for being such retrograde, anti-progress morons. From the NY Times (italics mine): In a speech that hit hard at the failings of Detroit automakers, Mr. Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate, said Japanese companies had done far better than their Detroit counterparts to develop energy efficient vehicles.... "For years, while foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology for their vehicles, American automakers were spending their time investing in…

Around the Web: 18 recent reports relevant to libraries and librarianship

I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here. Of course I've very likely missed a few, so suggestions are welcome in the comments. Shaping the Future of Monograph Publishing in the Liberal Arts: Results of a survey to Oberlin Group Faculty 2014 Planning Guide for Data Management ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2013 Higher Education's Top-…

50,000 Comments!

It seems like only yesterday we got to 10,000 comments and now John Mashey has posted the 50,000th comment, with more content than most blog posts. And here's his acceptance speech: Thanks to all. I always hoped my efforts would be rewarded, although I never expected this! CafePress is HQ'd about 20 miles away, although who knows, the T-shirt might come from China for all I know. There is at least hope that it's a short truck ride away. My forthcoming Deltoid T-shirt will take its proud place amongst some other rare T-shirts I own: -- SGI "Building a better dinosaur" Jurassic Park dino,…

Facebook shares at $4,000 each!

So it's official. I now own a portion of Facebook, even if it's a very tiny fraction of the some 240 million shares now on the market today, the initial public offering. The opening price this morning was at $42 per share, but even before they went on the market, some wealthy investors were already jockeying for their own piece. In one extraordinary case: From the Wall Street Journal: Knight Capital Group, one of the biggest aggregators of US retail share trading, is seeing orders for Facebook come in from brokerage firm clients -- including one from an investor willing to buy the stock…

Jail must really suck in Bulgaria

Losanoff JE, Kjossev KT. Gastrointestinal 'crosses'. A new shade from an old palette. Arch Surg. 1996 Feb;131(2):166-9. Okay, so within a single week in January of 1993, five male prisoners from the same Bulgarian prison were hospitalized with perforations of their gastrointestinal tracts. The perforations were the result of the prisoners' intentional ingestion of 'crosses' made out of paper clips and rubber bands. Two halves of a paper clip were tied crosswise with a rubber band, pulled together to collapse the cross, wrapped in a piece of paper, and ingested. The paper came loose along the…

Start Them Early: Interview with Karen Ventii

Karen Ventii is one of my SciBlings - her blog is Science To Life. At the second Science Blogging Conference in January she co-moderated a panel on Gender and Race in Science: online and offline, relevant to the discussion of racial diversity that is ongoing here on Scienceblogs right now. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? My name is Karen Ventii & I come from Ghana. What is your scientific background? I have a B.S and an M.S in Biology and I'm currently getting my Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Emory…

The Slow Death of Traditional Newspapers

As a companion piece to my post a few days ago regarding Christiane Amanpour's remarks about blogging, have a look at Andrew Sullivan's latest column for The Times Online. Lot's of interesting statistics: Between March and September the 500 biggest newspapers in America reported an average circulation decline of 4.6%. In six months. That's close to a 10% decline per year. No newspapers showed any but fractional gains. It is therefore a near-certainty that many towns and cities in America will no longer have a newspaper after the down-turn. And that may apply not just to small names but to…

Links for2009-07-28

kate_nepveu: Worldcon: online jerkitude "I'm trying to come up with a list of bedrock principles that apply across all online contexts, and I keep getting bogged down in my lawyer tendencies. So what would you say are the fundamental, applies-anywhere minimum requirements of human decency when it comes to online interactions?" (tags: internet culture society SF blogs) Invisible flash takes photos without the glare - tech - 16 July 2009 - New Scientist "Although the dark flash gives a crisp image without disturbing those in the picture, the results have an odd colour balance that looks…

Worth A Thousand Words

The ToBo Lab fish crew learning how to ID parrotfish from fish expert Rich Pyle aboard the Hi'ialakai "Visual storytelling through science/nature photography" was the fourth session I attended at Science Online 2011. Run by ace photographer and journalist Allie Wilkinson and photography enthusiast and science writer Melody Dye, the session focused on how to enrich the public understanding of science through imagery. We often don't realize how important visual presentation is in communication. Whether in the form of a pic next to a headline or a photo essay, images are powerful means of…

ScienceOnline 2009: Transitions

ScienceWoman and PropterDoc coordinated a session at ScienceOnline 09 that provided space for people to talk about different transitions they have blogged through, and how they navigated or negotiated those transitions. Both coordinators have gone through some job transitions which have manifested themselves in their blogs in different ways: ScienceWoman has gone from being a graduate student to a junior faculty member and has blogged through her pregnancy and now two years of her daughter's life, while PropterDoc has also changed jobs but also changed countries at the same time, and is…

TEDxLibrariansTO Countdown Questions: Day 5

The very fine TEDxLibrariansTO team is counting down to this Saturday's big event with some daily questions for us all to consider. The topic, of course, is Librarians as Thought Leaders! These are the questions for Day 5. I'll attempt to answer them and every day's questions very briefly. I figure if I go for extremely brief answers, there's actually a chance I'll get to them every day! Question 1: Name one thing we could do right now in order to be perceived as thought leaders outside the profession. My Answer: Predictably, perhaps, I'll answer that we should mostly (but not completely)…

The Problem with Textbooks - or is there a problem?

So, I put together part of my online textbook (finally). Let me give a little history and insight into this 'textbook'. Ok - I blog, I am sure you got that part already. When I write a post, I like it to start from the basic ideas so that anyone could find it and get what I am saying about some physics thing. Well, I started to realize that there were some things that I kept repeating (like how to add vectors). Instead of re-writing this every time a post had vectors, I made a post Basics: Vectors and Vector Addition. Then, I realized that I could keep doing this and slowly build up a…

Quick Picks on ScienceBlogs, August 11

"Taxicab Confessions: The Earwax Episode" "I usually try to avoid the subject [of what i do] with some people, because when i say "I study the inner ear" a lot of people feel the need to unload their medical problems regarding earwax upon me." And: is it a coincidence? Sandra Porter also has a post about earwax, here. "Vonnegut: Science Art" Did you know that Kurt Vonnegut has a website with original works of art that you can buy? I didn't! "Science losing a good friend in Lieberman" "Say what you want about Joe Lieberman and the political scene, but Lieberman for years has been one of…

Eat poultry? Data reveals brands that self-inspect under controversial USDA program

The food safety group Food & Water Watch (FWW) is publicizing data listing the companies and brands of chicken and turkey that have adopted the USDA's controversial "modernized" inspection system. The New Poultry Inspection System (NPIS) shifts responsibility for inspections from USDA specialists to company employees. The change was strongly opposed by food safety groups, but the Obama Administration implemented it anyway in early 2015. (Worker safety advocates also opposed the rule because it proposed a significant increase in line speeds which would lead to more repetitive motion…

Donohue Blames the Victims

Among the religious right leaders, almost no one can be counted on to, as Jon Stewart puts it, bring the crazy as consistently as Catholic League president Bill Donohue. You're gonna love his response to the possibility that Mark Foley was molested by a priest when he was a teenager: "As for the alleged abuse, it's time to ask some tough questions. First, there is a huge difference between being groped and being raped, so which was it Mr. Foley? Second, why didn't you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn't allow themselves to be molested. So…

DNA Identifies Ancient Foodstuffs

Here's a novel way of identifying the erstwhile contents of an ancient pottery vessel: never mind the chemical composition of the residue, the lipids, the proteins, the isotope ratios, the pollen, the phytholiths, the seeds or the leaf fragments. Just scrape some gunk off the inside of the sherds and check it for DNA snippets to identify the organisms that produced it! The beauty of this approach is that you will easily see if the DNA you've grabbed is likely to belong to the substance originally kept in the vessel. If you come up with your own DNA or that of a soil microbe or earthworm, then…

Super Bowl XLII: Pro and Con

Pro: 1) THE GIANTS WIN THE SUPER BOWL!!!!! w00t! 2) Michael Strahan and Amani Toomer get championship rings, which is particularly sweet, because they suffered through some really awful teams. 3) Eli Manning drinks for free in the tri-state area. This'll buy him at least six months of peace and quiet from the New York press. That was one of the all-time great fourth quarters. I have no idea how he got away from that one sack, and Tyree's catch was amazing. 4) This breaks up Boston's sports hegemony for the year, which couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of fans. 5) THE GIANTS WIN THE SUPER BOWL…

The Catholic League catches on to our latest subterfuge in the War on Christmas

The Catholic League is afraid parents might see The Golden Compass…and then buy the books for a Christmas gift. Horrors! You can't give books by atheists on Christmas! Watch the video from Fox News to witness the outrage. Also, I have to love this quote from a Christian who opposes the movie fervently, despite never having seen it or even reading the books. But he has his reasons. I don't have to read the book, I've never been bitten by a snake either, but I, you know, it's not something that I have to do to know that it's not going to, that it's not necessarily going to be a good thing for…

Here's another great example of what "support the troops" really means

Back at the beginning of April, ATA airlines suddenly went out of business. With no prior warning, they filed for bankruptcy and suspended all flights. This decision was sparked by FedEx's still unexplained decision to drop ATA from the group of airlines that they use to fulfill their military charter contracts as of October 1st. Before going belly-up, ATA did a lot of military charter business. So much, in fact, that the loss of the carrier means that troops are still facing delays of several days in coming home from the war zone. Apparently, FedEx has been unwilling to suck up the extra…

Louisiana Academic Freedom Act

Louisiana now has an Academic Freedom Act in the works. Academic Freedom Acts are right wing ploys to force specific issues ... or more commonly, specific politically or religiously motivated version of issues ... into the classroom at various levels. Academic Freedom Acts also typically are designed to silence faculty who teach things that conservatives, evangelicals, global warming deniers, and so on do not want to hear. From a commentary in The Daily Advertiser: Gov. Bobby Jindal's first regular-session legislative plan is designed to help Louisiana schools train a better work-force. So…

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Resigns

They're dropping like flies now. In another blow to the Bush Administration, The New York Times reports that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will announce his resignation later has announced his resignation (update) today... and it's about damn time. Senator Charles Schumer puts it lightly: Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who sits on the committee and has been calling for Mr. Gonzales's resignation for months, said this morning: "It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general has done the right thing and stepped down. For the previous six months…

Will bottom trawls have negative effects on deep-sea corals?

This is the fifth of five articles about the shared characteristics of shallow and deep-water corals. It's far from complete, I'm afraid. Deep corals are out of sight, but not out of reach. The commercial fishermen working above just trawled an old growth sea forest near New Zealand. The bubblegum corals (Paragorgia sp.) on deck in the pictures below are on the order of 100-200 years old. Notice there's not one colony on the deck, but several. The corals were collected from a seamount by commercial fishers trawling for "orange roughy"- the fish formerly known as "slimehead". They changed the…

Quack gets dose of his own medicine, nearly dies

A vitamin D overdose is nothing to laugh about — it's painful and debilitating, can cause kidney damage, and can kill. This is a case where consuming excessive amounts of a vitamin supplement can do more than help you make expensive urine, and can lead to crippling illness and death. Gary Null is a thorough quack who has been raking in the dough with — you guessed it — nearly worthless vitamin supplements. Now this would simply be a tragic story of one of his poor deluded suckers clients had come to harm from his magic crap food, but it's almost funny that Null nearly killed himself by eating…

Darwin Quotes

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin. - Charles R. Darwin Support The Beagle Project Read the Beagle Project Blog Buy the Beagle Project swag Prepare ahead for the Darwin Bicentennial Read Darwin for yourself.

Hey! Who knows where this gift shop is?

I need to buy a few dozen of these shirts to prop up my self-esteem. Probably a better question, but one that does my self-esteem no good at all, is to ask what they heck they're for? I know they're not actually for me — is there a place called PZ?

Dan Savage + Tim Minchin

O Delight! Savage interviews Minchin. It's beautiful. I'm also very sad. Minchin is coming to Minneapolis…on the same weekend I have to be in Las Vegas for TAM. Or I'd be there. You other Minnesotans better buy out every ticket to his performance so he'll feel like coming back.

Skull by Tim Biskup

I'm rather taken by Tim Biskup's work, especially his skulls. I think this design appeared on a limited edition Poketo wallet (the only type I buy) some years back, but I missed out on getting one. For shame. Artist:: Tim Biskup For more of his latest work, see the Design Collector blog.

Days of Squash and Cocoa: Eating Locally in February

The jars are emptying out here. Despite the fact that it was an unbelievably awful gardening year, somehow the canning jars filled up all the same, to the point that we actually ran out of pint and smaller jars. Now, boxes and cabinets are filling up with emptied jars, put away until I begin putting things up again. I still dig out the canning kettle once in a while in the winter - some apples going slightly soft inspire some applesauce now and again, but the season of preservation has not yet begun, and the time of emptying is upon us. Every day, our stocks decline. Every year there is a…

Kids with 'Dr' in front of their names: Interview with Ryan Somma

Ryan Somma is a software developer from coastal North Carolina who blogs on Ideonexus. It's all a blur now, but I think the Science Blogging Conference last month was his second. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real Life job? Scientific Background? (Looking around nervously.) Why do you wanna know? Ummm... My father was head of the Microbiology Department at ODU, and my mother teaches Nursing there. I rebelled against them by majoring in English and…

Toyota Builds a Faulty Accelerator System, and...

...Japanese industry decides that it needs to move away from making things people usually like to buy. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: Many economists and business executives say they hope that Toyota's trauma will be the unsettling blow that Japan needs to understand that its reliance on manufacturing and industrial exports, which served the country so well after World War II, is no longer wise. Yukio Noguchi, a professor of finance at Waseda University in Tokyo, said Japan must finally evolve into a postindustrial, service-based economy -- a painful transition that the United States and Great…

Well, sometimes you just have to Google it [Christina's LIS Rant]

So there I was, try all kinds of librarian ninja tricks on the fanciest, most expensive research databases money can buy (SciFinder, Reaxys, Inspec...) and no joy. Couldn't find what I needed. I'm perfectly willing to admit that I don't know all that much chemistry, but usually I do ok since I work with one chemist quite a bit. Finally I gave up and googled it. After a few tries, I found way down in the results an article about something else (like I needed a chemical in an aqueous solution and it had the chemical in alcohol), but the snippet drew my eye. Sure enough - had a table with my…

'Cause Kale and "Chikin" are the Same, Right?

Here's a charming example of corporate bullying - a major chain throwing its weight around so that we can't wear "Eat More Kale" t-shirts.: Chick-fil-A sent Mr. Muller-Moore a warning once before, in 2006, but did not pursue that matter. Now, Mr. Muller-Moore and Mr. Richardson are awaiting a response from the company, and they plan to continue with their trademark application. In a statement, Chick-fil-A said, "We must legally protect and defend our 'Eat mor chikin' trademarks in order to maintain rights to the slogan." But Mr. Richardson does not think the company's argument would hold up…

Congratulations, Rafe Furst

Rafe Furst of the legendary Tiltboys won his first bracelet at the World Series of Poker in the $1500 buy-in Pot Limit Hold Em event. He joins Phil Gordon (formerly the host of Celebrity Poker Showdown) and Perry Friedman as Tiltboys with bracelets. Making it even more impressive is the field he beat. The final 20 players included John Juanda, Dewey Tomko, Randy Jensen, Can Kim Hua and several other top players. And he came to the final table with only about half the stack of the chip leader. The Tiltboys, for those who don't know, are a group of poker players who met at Stanford and have…

Coal-to-liquids / Oil price

On the list of things to read-n-blog since before the summer hols has been John Flecks oil-to-liquids post. John says, quite perceptively, At some price (the usual number I hear is somewhere at or above $60 or $70 a barrel) it becomes economical to make liquid fuels out of coal... The question has been why they aren't pushing it now, with oil north of $120 a barrel? One possible answer is that the people who have skin in the game are not confident that oil will stay there. Oil is now well south of $120, indeed its about $90 as I speak, though of course the exchange rate has also shifted in…

Sandefur on a New Chief Justice

Timothy Sandefur has a brief post up about who might be named the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He pointed out a problem with a possible Thomas nomination that I hadn't thought of - why would he accept it? While there might be some lure to being the first black Chief Justice, it would also mean going through another nasty confirmation fight, and why on earth would he want to do that after what happened the first time? I can't imagine it would be worth it to him for what, as Sandefur points out, is little more than a lot of additional responsibilities. He does point out a very…

Picture Contest Winner

Some time back, I proposed a contest: The person who comes closest to the actual number [of pictures taken in Japan] without going over will win something cheap and tacky from Japan that I will buy before I leave. I haven't fogotten about this, I've just been too busy to do all that much with the pictures. But we do have a winner, of this priceless artifact: The total number of pictures I took on the trip was 1,508 (or, at least, that's the total number I ended up with-- I distinctly remember taking some pictures at one temple in northwest Kyoto, but they're not on either of the memory…

How to Teach Physics to Your Brazilian Dog

As I was heading out with SteelyKid to do some shopping, I noticed that the mail had arrived, including a large book mailer from my agent. I was a little puzzled as to what that could be, but left it for my return. Where I was pleased to open the envelope and find: That's a copy of Como Ensinar FÃsica ao Seu Cachorro, that is, the Portuguese translation of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I can't directly read a word of it, of course, but having written the original, I can identify some key amusing phrases, such as "Coelhos feitos de queijo" and "Cuidado com os esquilos perversos," which is…

Little Brother for Free

Speaking of YA literature (as I was, briefly, in the previous post), I would be remiss if I didn't note that Cory Doctorow has put up a Little Brother section on his web site, promoting his new book. As with all of his books, it's available for free download, so if you'd like to read it but don't want to pay for it sight unseen, you can check it out. You may or may not remember, but I enthusiastically reviewed it back in March (I got an ARC at Boskone): Little Brother is Cory Doctorow's bid for a place on this year's list of banned books. It's a book that not only encourages kids to hack…

links for 2008-05-04

Closing the achievement gap in math and science "The latest results from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Math and Science Partnership (MSP) program show not only improved proficiency among all elementary and middle school students, but also a closing of the achievement gaps between both African (tags: science education academia race) Computational modeling « Confused at a higher level "That I am 'modeling' nature in my studies was not entirely obvious to me until I spent some time collaborating with Randy Hulet as well as with Barry Dunning when I was at Rice." (tags: physics…

Reason interviews Jackson Publick, co-creator of The Venture Brothers

Reason magazine has a great interview with Jackson Publick, the co-creator of one of my favorite shows The Venture Brothers. For those of you who haven't seen it, it is sort of a parody of all the cartoons from the 60s like Jonny Quest where supergenius kids fought crime and had archnemeses. (The word "archnemesis" has a plural, right?) Money quote: Reason: The cliches of this material, though, like the mystery-solving whiz kids and the Dr. Evil character, aren't ever treated seriously anymore. Not even in the stuff on the Disney Channel that's meant for kids. JP: All of that is so…

Well, sometimes you just have to Google it

So there I was, try all kinds of librarian ninja tricks on the fanciest, most expensive research databases money can buy (SciFinder, Reaxys, Inspec...) and no joy. Couldn't find what I needed. I'm perfectly willing to admit that I don't know all that much chemistry, but usually I do ok since I work with one chemist quite a bit. Finally I gave up and googled it. After a few tries, I found way down in the results an article about something else (like I needed a chemical in an aqueous solution and it had the chemical in alcohol), but the snippet drew my eye. Sure enough - had a table with my…