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Python Programming To Automate Common Tasks

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners by super Python expert Al Sweigart is a pretty thick intermedia to somewhat advanced level programming book. It covers how Python works, so someone familiar with programming languages can get up to speed. Then, the book tackles a number of key important tasks one may use a computer for. This includes working with Regular Expressions, file reading and writing, web scraping, interacting with Excel spreadsheets and PDF files, scheduling things, working with email, manipulating images, and messing around with the…

Links for 2012-02-01

slacktivist » Fine-tuning the keywords on your résumé They don't warn you about the bewildering, befuddling vertigo that comes with having done everything they say to do, all to no avail, and having no idea what to do next. There you are, willing and eager to wear away whatever leather there still is on your shoes, but you have no idea what direction to walk. There sits the phone, but you have no one left to call. And you've refined your online job-searching skills to the point where it takes you only a fraction of the time to confirm that there's nothing out there. Now what? What happens…

Petition for Senators to Back Stem Cells

I had wanted to avoid being an activist with this blog, but I think it is important enough when it relates to a directly scientific issue to break that rule. The Society for Neuroscience has issued a petition request via email asking its members to petition their Senators to vote YES for the current Senate resolution reauthorizing stem cell research. Here is the email: Support Stem Cell Research Legislation! On Monday and Tuesday of next week, the Senate will consider bipartisan legislation, called The Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act (H.R. 810). This bill would expand federally funded…

Ten quirky species...

<insert The Count From Sesame Street's laugh here> Okay, so the International Institute for Species Exploration has come up with a list of ten new species named in the last year. It's clearly for promotional purposes, with nothing much other than an interest in new species underpinning it for all that there were a slew of experts involved in the choice, so I fail to see what the Bleiman Bros. are bitching about. Just like lists of the Best Songs of All Time, beauty and significance lie in the eyes of the beholder. What is significant is that thousands of new species were named and…

Evolution Gets Pixelated and Playable with Spore

Is anyone else biting at the bit to play this game? I have been following the progress of Sims guru Will Wright in his latest creation, Spore, which attempts to make a game out of evolution. Life and eventually culture is playable in a succession of phases, which are linked on the timeline of guided development: molecular, cellular, creature, tribal, civilization, terraform and galactic. Wright has incorporated much of his previous projects into Spore, heavy on the SimCity once you hit the tribal phase. More below the fold, including a longer video tutorial. Development seems to rely on the…

My first sculptie

Second Life (SL) is a 3d virtual world (some would call it an online game, but it's not really that; for one thing, it kind of sucks as a game, and for another thing, it's much more than that). You can do modeling and building entirely online. People have created buildings, vehicles, sculptures, animals, hairdos, and any number of other things using SL's relatively easy to learn modeling tools. Builds in SL are made out of "prims," short for primitives. There are a relatively small number of primitives; a block (cube), a sphere, a cylindar, a torus, a ring, that sort of thing. You can…

Annals of McCain - Palin, XXXVI: Whassup 1999 and 2008

Superbowl commercials are a thing unto themselves. Some people watch just for the commercials. The famous Apple "1984" ad only ran once, during the 1984 Superbowl, although it has been seen online hundreds of thousands of times since. Another famous ad was the 1999 Budweiser "Whassup" ad. If you've never seen it, here it is: John McCain's wealth is from his wife's family's Budweiser Distributership. Which brings us to the election-appropriate hilarious sequel, Whassup 2008:

Useful Things

Because I must trim browser tabs, here is a current short list of things that might be useful: Threebody - online implementation of the open source IAS15 integrator - a 15th order high precision N-body integrator - ASCL - Astrophysics Source Code Library - Open Source Code Visible Spectra of the Elements - Except Astatine :-( Astronomy Simulators - small web simulators for elementary concepts. Some quite nifty. From University of Nebraska. All the Kepler 2 Campaign 0 data - with some tools to play with it

My Death as Envisioned by Edward Gorey

Thanks to my blog sibling, Orac, I now know how I will die; What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die? You will be sucked dry by a leech. I'd stay away from swimming holes, and stick to good old cement. Even if it does hurt like hell when your toe scrapes the bottom.Take this quiz! Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code And I thought I was going to be run over by a speeding bus. ... . tags: online quiz, Edward Gorey

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fifty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Moneduloides. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 28 January, two weeks from now 11 February. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro. And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!

Out of Power

I am posting this from a friend's office because we are without power at the moment, so I can't do anything online. We got hit with a nasty snowstorm overnight, very wet and heavy snow, and have been out of power since the middle of the night. Which, in the country, means no water as well as no lights and heat. So, I'll be back to post, answer comments, chat and answer e-mail as soon as I have power again. Hopefully soon.

Eat My Dust, Darwin!

How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog continues to sell very well. The vanity search today led me to this, screen captured from the Guardian newspaper in the UK, which sells our book in its online bookshop: Woo! Take that, biology! Yeah, yeah, I should be so lucky as to squeak onto the list in 150 years. Still, it's kind of a hoot to see that list.

If this is Friday, I must be in Sydney

I am briefly back from internetless visits to family in Victoria (my home state), and shortly to fly out to Lisbon where I am to give two talks I have yet to finish writing (of course! Not to worry, I always do this). In the interim I must proof my book and do a thousand things. Once all this is done I promise to put some substance online here. Very possibly my talk on trees (yes, there's a slew more to come). Meanwhile, talk amongst yourselves.

Do-it-Yourself Fireworks

Finally, our fourth and final Independence day treat--Make your own fireworks! This fun little flash tool from Fireworks.com lets you create your own fireworks display, with your choice of backdrop. There are a number of city skylines available, including Denver, New York, and San Francisco, as well as some fun sights like the Egyptian pyramids. So, if you live in an area where fireworks aren’t allowed, or just want to blow things up online, then click away!

Technical problems resolved

Previous technical problems that prevented my posts and your comments from showing up on this blog have now been resolved. Orac is back online. Everything appears to be working as it should, and you should be able to comment again. If you haven't contributed your own You might be an altie if... idea, now's the time to jump in. (There are a lot of great entries there that I wish I had thought of.) Normal blogging will resume tomorrow.

Spiders Like Meat

Here's your crazy factoid of the day. It's from the recent article on spider hunters in the New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger (not online): Spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.

Zimmer & Carroll vow no more bloggingheads.tv appearances

Carl Zimmer is rather mild-mannered, but has expressed rather strong sentiments about what recently happened on bloggingheads.tv. Sean Carroll, not surprisingly, has stronger opinions. But they're now both proactively dissociating themselves from bloggingheads.tv. The McWhorter & Behe discussion is now back online. The issue is really simple. John McWhorter played up Michael Behe's ideas as awesome, mind-blowing and revolutionary for an hour. Most scientists don't consider Behe's ideas controversial, they consider them crankery.

Why good science journalists are rare?

Science coverage in New York Times is good because they can afford a whole stable of people, each expert in one field only. If Carl Zimmer was forced to cover, on a daily basis and without time to research, everything from astronomy and physics to archaeology and materials science, he would do a bad job, too. But he is given time to pick his own area - evolution - to study it for years, and to write whatever the heck he wants on any given week. So Carl is an expert on what he is writing. A small paper with one science beat reporter will have to cover everything and that reporter will thus…

Snake Oil Science sounds like a great read

A former research director for a complementary and alternative medicine program at a major academic medical center has just released a book that I must get my hands on. I just learned about "Snake Oil Science" by R. Barker Bausell from a Jerry Adler article in the current issue of Newsweek (10 Dec 2007). To set the proper context, med bloggers like Orac, Dr. R.W., Panda Bear, MD, Sid Schwab, and we here at Terra Sig have been increasingly expressing concern about the seemingly uncritical integration of alternative medicine programs into some of North America's most respected medical schools…

I'm back

The long school holidays draw to a close, and with it the disruptions to my online-ness. We went to Mallorca, we went to Wales, we went to Torpenhow (the latter set is rather boring because the interesting ones are private. Sorry). So I have to catch up on a whole pile of online stuff, and rant about our stupid politicians. And cut the grass. Tomorrow.

I'm on the Internets!

By that, of course, I mean the more widely read internets: specificially, the Charlotte Observer's online content. They're featuring my blog this week in their science section. I knew I was going to be in print, but I didn't know I was going to be online, too! Totally cool. Anyhow, go check it out. And you can check out the full version of that blog right here.

You can laugh now....

...but some people knew waaay back then that news will, one day, move from expensive paper to cheap internet: From here TechCrunch surfaced this look at a story that ran back in 1981 that covered how internet news would someday be delivered. At least watch the last 30 seconds. The reporter remarks it would take more than 2 hours to deliver the digital text needed to read the "online newspaper." She added the per minute (i think) charge was around $5 and comments about the difficulty the new approach would have when competing with the .20 cent daily. What's in store for us over the next 30…

Man without fingerprints stumps airport security

USA Today reports the curious case of a Singapore man who was detained for several hours by airport security when they couldn't find his fingerprints. The man, who was taking capecitabine as part of chemotherapy treatment, suffered from hand-foot syndrome, a side effect of the drug where skin peels off. His oncologist describes the unusual case today in an online letter to the Annals of Oncology. The problem is not as rare as you might think. Around one in 50 people in the world lack identifiable fingerprints; an official from the Department of Homeland Security reported "We have standard…

More on graduation rates

In answer to requests from the previous post on graduation rates, here's the same data broken down by race. African Americans still lag whites in graduation rates, but have made impressive gains in high school graduation rates, though graduation appears more likely to be delayed. African Americans are making impressive gains in grad school, but only quite recently. I may try to look at income later, but that's trickier to handle. The societal decline in number of people completing grad school in any subject is declining regardless. I haven't figured out how to separate non-Hispanic whites…

Network-like Mode of Thinking

I am so glad to see that conversations started face-to-face at the Science Blogging Conference are now continuing online (see the bottom of the ever-growing linkfests here and here). While some are between science bloggers, as expected, others are between people who have never heard of each other before and who came from very different angles and with different interests. The cross-fertilization we hoped for is happening (and if you had such an experience, let us know)! See, for instance, what a casual chat over lunch at the Conference did to David Warlick - made him think about education…

Uncovering Tobacco Industry Strategies - You Can Help

Over the past few years, millions of formlerly secret internal documents from the tobacco industry have been made public and helped public health advocates learn how Big Tobacco deceived lawmakers and the public about smoking's health risks. Wading through all these documents is time-consuming, so the Center for Media and Democracy has launched a TobaccoWiki that will allow people interested in the subject to share their findings online. (A Wiki is basically a tool for online collaboration; see Wikipedia's explanation to learn more about it.) Here's their explanation of the project: The…

Science Cafe Raleigh - Darwin lives on: how gene-environment interactions affect modern society

This month's Science Cafe (description below) will be held on March 24th at Tir Na Nog. Our speaker is Dr. David Reif from the US Environmental Protection Agency. That evening we will be talking about the interplay between our genetic makeup and our environment & lifestyles. We will also discuss human genetics with a focus on evolutionary theory. Here is a link (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1879213,00.html#) to an interesting article by a popular author, Carl Zimmer that you might find fun to read. The article gives some background on Darwin and the ideas behind his…

The Rude Implements of Savages

A very early classic of Swedish archaeology is the zoologist Sven Nilsson's 1838-1843 book Skandinaviska nordens urinvånare. The work is a seminal exercise in ethnoarchaeology, where Nilsson used contemporary ethographic accounts of lo-tech societies to interpret Stone Age finds. Nilsson opens the first chapter as follows (and I translate, as the 1866 English edition doesn't appear to be available on-line): "Everyone knows that in Scandinavia, as in many other countries, one often finds in the earth artificially shaped stone objects that have clearly been wrought by human hands and made for…

Farrell on Wikipedia

Sorry for the light blogging lately. I'm furiously trying to finish up some writing projects that have been festering for a while. I'm a painfully slow writer, and there's a limit to how many hours a day I can stand pecking away at the computer. Alas, this state of affairs is likely to continue for a while. But, incredibly, the world has not stopped turning during my brief break. So here are a few items for your consideration. First, have a look at this article by John Farrell, about Wikipedia: A car that runs on water, a new form of energy derived from 'hydrinos', a 'cognitive-theoretic…

Links for 2010-12-07

Locus Online: Locus Magazine Digital Editions "Starting January 2011, we will be launching our first digital editions of Locus magazine. Subscriptions will be available in, at minimum, PDF format, and we hope to have e-pub and Kindle versions also. We plan to primarily distribute from our own website, though we will be looking into other distribution options as well. Many of our readers have requested digital editions, and we are excited to be able to offer this alternative." (tags: sf books magazines internet publishing) Dropping the turkey to cook it - another method | Wired Science |…

Question of the Week #4, Followup

Here I answered out overlord's question of the week, namely: Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies? This press release is therefore particularly apt: Americans support free access to research Poll results show overwhelming majority believes federally funded research should be publicly available Washington, DC – May 31, 2006 – In an online survey of public attitudes conducted recently and released today by Harris Interactive®, 8 out of 10 (82%)…

The World Science: a virtual Science Cafe

The World is a radio show co-produced by WGBH Boston, Public Radio International and BBC. You can probably hear it on your local NPR station - if not, you can find all the shows recorded on the website. You may remember that I went to Boston a couple of months ago, as part of a team of people helping the show do something special: use the NSF grant they recently received to expand their science coverage and, in collaboration with Sigma Xi and NOVA, tie their radio science coverage to their online offerings. The result is The World: Science website, a series of weekly science podcasts with…

With Data from Multiple Funders, Who Owns the Data? A Real Concern for Microbial Genomics

Doug Natelson raises a good question about when data should be made publicly available: 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 kick in? This is actually a fairly common problem in…

Best Science Books 2013: Boing Boing Gift Guide

Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that I can find around the web in various media outlets. From the beginning it’s been a pretty popular service so I’m happy to continue it. The previous posts for all the 2013 lists are here. This time it's the Boing Boing 2014 Gift Guide. Make: Analog Synthesizers by Ray Wilson Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong-and What You Really Need to Know by Emily Oster Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings Toms…

Wave Your Lighters in the Air Like You Truly, Deeply Care

Blogging will continue to be relatively light for the next few weeks, as I'm currently in a sort of Vacation Interregnum-- as you can tell from the picture posts, we just got back from the Virgin Islands, and at the end of next week, we're heading to Japan for three weeks of tourism and Worldcon. Also, I'm still catching up on stuff that happened when I was out of town last week. As a child of the 80's, though, I can't let jefitoblog's new project pass by without comment: for the month of August, he's posting a Power Ballad of the Day. Notable songs to date include "The Flame" by Cheap Trick…

Healthcare reform roundup: The Turnaround

The healthcare debate in Lincoln, NE, earlier this year. photo: Nat Harnik, AP, via the NY Times The tone of discussions of reform in both Congress and the blogosphere has changed remarkably over the last few days. It's gone from pessimistic to optimistic, and from a sense of retreat and a whittling away of substantive reform toward a careful expansion of reform -- including the inclusion of a public option. Many a slip between cup and lip, of course, and things could (and almost certianly will) bounce around some more yet. But it's certainly getting more interesting. My own short list of…

I was lost, and then I was found

I received two packages the other day. The first was a substantial box, and when I opened it, I discovered a Bible, something called the Amplified Bible, a CD called "He is exalted" with recorded sermons just in case I was illiterate, a bookmark with a quote from Proverbs, a thank you note for allowing them to share the word of god with me today, and a copy of Bill Wiese's "23 Minutes in Hell", which purportedly documents in graphic detail an account of the author's brief sojourn in Hell, just in case the nice approach didn't work on me. Apparently someone decided to buy the missionary…

Univ. of Michigan To My Rescue!

Got this from UM's publishing license negotiation team. I asked for permission to publish the email, and they said sure. I removed names just in case anybody decided to be over-zealous again. :) ---------------- Hi Shelley, I'm the Electronic Resources Officer at the University of Michigan Library, i.e. one of the people responsible for negotiating licenses with publishers. I just found out about the recent unpleasantness with the Society of Chemical Industry over your use of the graphs from one of their journals in Wiley InterScience. I'm just checking in to make sure everything is ok and…

Your hydrogen bond angle is 10° greater than ordinary water (114°)!

Quacks have no shame, but once reputable science and engineering magazines should have some vestiges of it. Popular Science magazine will take money from anyone for the ad revenue, as Cyde Weys demonstrates with a scan of an ad for energized water. It will cure cancer and diabetes, and kills bacteria. It's crazy and stupid. Your blood is 94% water and billions of people flush their diseases along with medication into the ground water 4-5 times/day and it ends up at a faucet somewhere. If you have well water and people in the area have cancer, you have a good chance of getting cancer! S.D.…

Ethyl Acetate (Pineapple solvent?)

This is one that will be familiar to anyone who works in chemistry, but I was a bit surprised to see it the first time I went into a lab. Certain compounds, called esters, can be prepared from an acid and an alcohol (usually a carboxylic acid). They are ubiquitous in the flavor and fragrance industry (although they're not quite stable to water over the long-term, and once an ester is hydrolyzed, it liberates its component alcohol and acid, which are often pretty rank). One classic organic lab is preparing some sweet-smelling esters from otherwise nasty-smelling carboxylic acids and esters (…

Costco

My uncle describes Costco as the place "where you go broke saving money". That certainly describes my experience of the warehouse store - I walk in for some toilet paper and leave with a new television, a tub of cashews and a lifetime supply of chapstick. ABC News recently had an interesting profile of the retail company: Costco's membership is largely made up of middle- and upper-middle class families and small business owners who pay $50 to $100 for annual memberships. So far this year, Costco has reported $386 million in revenues from membership fees alone. Loyal customers are willing to…

Gray's Anatomy:Uncanny Valley

Ever wonder what the pilot for "Gray's Anatomy:Uncanny Valley" would be like? Well, you're in luck! If It Weren't For You (I'd Be Sued) from Justine Cooper on Vimeo. Yes, that was a . . . music video in which an unseen clinician serenades the mannequins used in medical simulation with an infectious rock ballad. Emoting on the depth of their relationship, the doctor or nurse apologizes to the mannequins for what they go through in the name of patient safety and the improvement of clinical skills, crooning the chorus "If it weren't for you, I'd be sued." It turns out the video is just part of…

Signals of selection in the human genome: important new paper

I'll hopefully have more time to write about this tomorrow, but for now I'll simply suggest that you go and read the free full text PDF of this advance online manuscript in Genome Research. This is the most important recent paper in the field of human evolutionary genetics - a thorough and careful analysis of the signatures of positive natural selection left in our genome by the last 10-40,000 years of adaptation, using a population sample that is far broader than those used in previous studies (53 populations rather than 4). I covered some of the approaches used in the paper in this post on…

The Senator Larry Craig Gay Sex Bathroom Stall Is NOT For Sale!

This important story was broken by the Minnesota Independent. The agency that runs the airport refused an apparently serious offer to buy the men's room stall made famous by Craig's 2007 conviction for disorderly conduct in a sex-solicitation sting operation by the airport police. The Metropolitan Airport Commission (MAC) spurned the $5,000 offer, which arrived by certified mail, according to MAC spokesperson Patrick Hogan. Details are here. And here is some related video content. Includes explicit demonstration of gay sex solicitation toe tapping.

Go to Dublin…for the science!

Since the World Atheist Conference is in Dublin this June, you should go just to test this scientific conclusion: the Guinness does taste better in Ireland. I think so, too. So here's the experiment: buy a glass of Guinness in your airport bar, fly to Ireland, drink some more there. Attend the atheist conference to cleanse the palate, as it were. Drink more Guinness, get on the plane and fly home, and have another one. Compare. So now you have another reason to go. It's an Experiment!

What you want for XMas... a brain computer interface!

Are you ready for the future?! Is text messaging just too fast for you?! Are you ready to type a blazingly fast few words a minute after hours and hours of training?! We have the must buy device for you! You can get the G-Tex Intendix brain- computer interface for the amazingly great value of $12,250. Ok I jest... if you're paralyzed this might be a great device - otherwise, a huge huge huge waste of money. You can also check out a pretty cool video over @ Engadget.

Darwin as a historiographer

I was very pleased to receive today my copy of this book: A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, edited by A. Tucker. Chichester UK: Wiley-Blackwell. I got it because on pp 405-415 is my essay "Darwin", which I am rather proud of. I have long thought that Darwin as a philosopher of history is undervalued, but much more interesting than Hegel or Marx. Anyway, if you don't tell anyone, I have made a rough scan available here, although you really ought to make your library buy a copy.

Crayon Physics Review

A quick note: remember I blogged about Crayon Physics a while ago? Well, Adrian wrote a massive review of the game at his blog. While he has reservations, he concludes, Crayon Physics is worth more than a lot of other things you can buy for twenty American dollars, and it gave me days of genuine good fun, an outstanding aesthetic experience, one of the most inspired themes around, and the chance to exercise my own creativity in the level editor. If you were interested in Crayon Physics, definitely check his review out.

Cephalart

Here's the weekly collection of submitted art (and other) featuring cephalopods. This is the work of Evan Harris, with his strangely dissipated-looking sailor playing a cephalochord. Lego's Aqua Raiders set features a giant squid with too few arms: it looks more like a spider to me. Look! Pearl Jam played in Australia! This is part of a whole collection of octopus jewelry. Anybody who wants to buy me the complete set for Cephalopodmas, contact me and I'll send a shipping address. The one piece is $1350. Cheap!

I Hope the Future of Gnome is Not Unity

I agree with Shawn Powers that Unity has offended all that is good in this world by aggressively grabbing so much of my screen real estate much like Hitler grabbed the Rhineland. Well, OK, S.P. is not so Godwinesque in his language, but still.... Unity = Microsoft-like marketing oriented philosophy in a FOSS world. I predict Unity will die the death of misuse except in all those commercially marketed end-user systems that force Linux on the owners at places like Best Buy. Here's Shawn Powers on Unity…