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Misty NYC

tags: Manhattan, NYC through my eye, photography, NYC Looking east along West 21st in Manhattan on a foggy evening (2 May 2008). Image: GrrlScientist 2008 [larger view]. Last week, I went to Seed Media Group's offices in Midtown Manhattan to hang out with two of my colleagues at ScienceBlogs, Jake (who lives in NYC) and Razib (who was visiting), as well as to talk with the Seed people and to drink some free beer. They buy great beer, not that undrinkable michelob light crap, by the way. When I left that evening, I was delighted to see that the city had become foggy and cool, but wasn't…

Another Way Big Sh-tpile Is Hammering Municipalities

A couple of weeks ago, I described how the collapse of bond insurers meant that it will be harder and more expensive for state and local governments to float bonds, which means you'll get fewer government services and have to pay higher taxes, mostly property taxes, for them. Well, Bit Shitpile just keeps rollin' on (italics mine): The credit crisis paining Wall Street is reaching out across the nation, afflicting municipalities, hospitals and cultural touchstones like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In recent days another large but obscure corner of the financial world has come under acute…

I Always Did Like Roger Ebert

From the archives comes this post about movie critic Roger Ebert and the email he sent me. A little while back, Roger Ebert wrote a column assailing Imax theaters for pulling movies that were about the origin of life, the origin of the universe, and evolution. I suggested that we should send him email and thank him for supporting science. Well, I did just that, and in my email In Box today was a reply from Ebert. Pretty damn cool.To sum up, he says that he's received a lot of ('countless') emails from creationists who use ridiculous arguments. The criticism he's received the most is what he (…

Joan Crawford has risen from the grave!

As it says in the good book: Junkies down in Brooklyn are going crazy They're laughing just like hungry dogs in the street Policemen are hiding behind the skirts of little girls Their eyes have turned the color of frozen meat No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Joan Crawford has risen from the grave Joan Crawford has risen from the grave Catholic school girls have thrown away their mascara They chain themselves to the axles of big Mac trucks The sky is filled with hordes of shimmering angels The fat lady laughs, "Gentlemen, start your trucks" Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no…

Big Media Me: Here and Now

The NPR program Here and Now has been running segments this week on Science in America, and one of these from yesterday featured me talking about science literacy. We had some technical difficulties getting this recorded-- it was supposed to happen at a local radio studio last week, but they had some kind of glitch, so instead we did it via Skype from my office on campus. (Where there was some sort of heavy equipment running outside my window before and after the interview, but miraculously, they took a coffee break for the crucial fifteen minutes of the actual call...) You can listen to the…

Cosmic 'Spitballs' Released From Milky Way's Black Hole (Synopsis)

"Other galaxies like Andromeda are shooting these ‘spitballs’ at us all the time." -James Guillochon, coauthor on the new study Imagine you're a star passing too close to a black hole. What's going to happen to you? Yes, you'll be tidally disrupted and eventually torn apart. Some of the matter will be swallowed, some will wind up in an accretion disk, and some will be accelerated and ejected entirely. But quite surprisingly, the ejected matter doesn't just come out in the form of hot gas, but it condenses into large numbers of rapidly-moving planets. An artist's illustration of large, rapid…

The Astroturf de Tocqueville Institute, update

John Quiggin has a heuristic to help detect outfits like The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute. ADTI claimed that Ken Brown's attack on Linux was based on "extensive interviews" with "Richard Stallman, Dennis Ritchie, and Andrew Tanenbaum". We already saw Tanenbaum's repudiation of Brown. Now Groklaw has Stallman's and Ritchie's. The one from Ritchie is particularly interesting because it lets us see the leading questions Brown was asking: In my opinion, Linus Torvalds did NOT write Linux from scratch. What is you opinion? How much did he write? I talked to a Finnish programmer…

Pseudoscience in the Press of the Past | 06/30/2007

Today starts a new series that I perhaps blatantly stole from Shelley over at Retrospectacle, but it's such a darn great idea! From the mouth of Shelley: Pretty much I'm just going to dig back into the forgotten and moldering annuls of scientific publications to find weird and interesting studies that very likely would never be published or done today (and perhaps never should have.) Clearly I'm not doing the same thing, but her idea gave me one of my own. We here at Omni Brain will be digging into classic media coverage of all things science (usually brain related - clearly). I have a…

Phineas Gage, the feral child & the unresponsive bystanders

Four representations of Phineas Gage, from Macmillan, M. (2006). Restoring Phineas Gage: A 150th Retrospective. J. Hist. Neurosci. 9: 46-66. [Abstract] Here's some more neurohistory from the Beeb: following on from last week's episode of In Our Time, which featured a discussion about the history of the brain, is the BBC Radio 4 series Case Study, which looks at - yes, you've guessed it - individual case studies that have made significant contributions to neuroscience and psychology. In the third episode of the series, which airs tomorrow at 11am GMT is now online, presenter Claudia…

I'll try to say something WiSE tomorrow

WiSE, a network of Women in Science and Engineering at Duke University is hosting a panel Shaping the world, one job at a time: An altruistic/alternative career panel tomorrow, Friday, at noon in Teer 203. If you want to show up, please RSVP online as soon as possible so they know how many boxed lunches to get. It will be an informal panel: each one of us will get 3-5 minutes to introduce ourselves, followed by a discussion and Q&A. We are also likely to hang around for a few more minutes afterwards. The panelists? Under the fold.... Rochelle Schwartz-Bloom: K-12 education Dr.…

"Women in Science" blogs: can they be used as recruitment tools for girls?

It has been proposed by the fabulous Pat of FairerScience and other places that the developing genre of "women in science" blogs might be used as a way to recruit girls and young women into science and engineering careers(see a good outline and guidelines here). Women who write about their passion for doing science, their ideas for balancing work and family, their professional desires and challenges may indeed encourage girls who are readers to consider science - I think about it as an online version of seeing women as role-models in science. I'd like to get your thoughts on the subject, in…

More Flu Measures

The administration are people too. I just want to start off saying that. However, in this case, I just don't get it. The more I think about it, the less I get it. Here is the plan our administration came up with. Faculty will report class absences for every Tuesday and Wednesday course. Absence reports are due online by Friday. I guess the goal here is to try to monitor the health of the student population and see if we have a flu outbreak or something. Here are the first problems I thought of: Won't there be some type of attendance noise anyway? Maybe attendance goes up and down…

My picks from ScienceDaily

How Zebra Finches Learn Songs: Cellular Killer Also Important To Memory: A protein known primarily for its role in killing cells also plays a part in memory formation, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report. Their work exploring how zebra finches learn songs could have implications for treatment of neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease. ----------------- "Graham had this intuition that growth and memory is really a kind of remodeling," said Clayton, who is a professor of cell and structural biology. "You can't have growth without…

Adapting in Place and Memorial Day Weekend

A couple of administrative notes before I head off to a weekend involving friends, arboretum plant sales, weeding the asparagus patch, planting an alphabet garden and trying to decide if we really do need a pet sheep. First, as some of you may remember I'm running an on-site family workshop at my house in rural upstate New York over Memorial Day weekend. Families are coming with their kids (if any) to spend time learning about goat care, dairying, herbs, gardening, poultry, wild foods, soil building, reducing your energy usage and adapting in place. I've got one spot left for a family…

Bone marrow for Vinay

Over the summer, I wrote about Vinay Chakravarthy, a doctor of South Asian descent who had been recently diagnosed (at the age of 28 and fresh out of medical school) with leukemia and was in need of a bone marrow transplant. However, as Razib and others noted, the odds of him finding a match were quite slim (~1 in 20,000), given the small donor pool that was most genetically similar. Vinay's friends and families took his misfortune and turned it into something positive, organizing bone marrow drives in several states, and concentrating on getting additional minority donors to join the…

ScienceOnline'09 - introducing the participants

So, let's highlight some of the participants of this year's ScienceOnline09 conference: Eva Amsen is a newly-minted PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Toronto, and she blogs on Easternblot, Expression Patterns and Musicians and Scientists. Melissa Anley-Mills is the News Director in the Office of Research and Development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Samia Ansari is a Biochemistry Undergraduate student at the University of Georgia, and she blogs on 49 percent. She will co-moderate the session on Race in science - online and offline. Apryl Bailey is the Creative Director…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Social Amoeba Seek Kin Association: Starving "social amoebae" called Dictyostelium discoideum seek the support of "kin" when they form multi-cellular organisms made up of dead stalks and living spores, said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University in Houston in a report that appears online today in the open-access journal Public Library of Science Biology. Adult Brain Neurons Can Remodel Connections: Overturning a century of prevailing thought, scientists are finding that neurons in the adult brain can remodel their connections. In work reported in the Nov. 24 online…

Week in review

This was a busy, crazy week. On Monday and Tuesday I was in Boston. You may remember I went to Boston last year as well and for the same reason - spending a day at the WGNH studios, helping with the World Science project that combines radio, podcasts and online forums. You have probably noticed I have posted announcements of these throughout the year. A short story airs on the radio show The World, about some science-related topic with a global angle. The same scientist (or physician, or science journalist) who is interviewed for a couple of minutes on air is also interviewed for 20 minutes…

Iranian Nukes - Plain Language Repost

This spring I took a look at the Iranian nuclear options. The summary version is that I think the focus on uranium enrichment is a red herring (unless there is intelligence that says there is a policy decision in Iran to go that route - presumably following Pakistan - except the public evidence is consistent with Iran following all options for nuclear development, HEU, Pu-239 breeding from power reactors, and from natural uranium heavy water reactors). The way for Iran to get a few nukes quickly, is to reprocess the fuel of the Bushehr-1 reactor, after a "short burn" (to avoid Pu-240…

Breaking the inverted pyramid - placing news in context

News journalism relies on a tried-and-tested model of inverted storytelling. Contrary to the introduction-middle-end style of writing that pervades school essays and scientific papers, most news stories shove all the key facts into the first paragraphs, leaving the rest of the prose to present background, details and other paraphernalia in descending order of importance. The idea behind this inverted pyramid is that a story can be shortened by whatever degree without losing what are presumed to be the key facts. But recently, several writers have argued that this model is outdated and needs…

More dangers of internet drug purchasing

It's been just over a month since we last discussed cases of misfilled internet prescriptions and misbehavior by a US drug wholesaling firm. Yesterday, Sandra Kiume at OmniBrain told us about the death of a woman in British Columbia from what sounds like another case of terribly misrepresented drugs purchased over the internet (a second story is here). As Sandra noted, A "strong sleeping pill and sedative" which "has been linked to overdose deaths in other countries and is not legally available in Canada" [nobody says which one!] along with an "anti-anxiety" medication and acetaminophen…

Birds in the News 162

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Chatham Island (Mollymawk) Albatross, Thalassarche cauta eremita. With 18 out of 22 albatross species threatened with extinction, the FAO should be congratulated on establishing a gold standard for reducing seabird bycatch -- a major conservation step forward. Image: Alan Tate [larger view]. Birds in Science Some of the world's leading paleontologists are attempting to recreate a dinosaur -- or something a lot like a dinosaur -- by starting with a chicken embryo and working backward to engineer a "chickenosaurus" or…

Nematodes and Crohn's Disease?

When I was taking invertebrate zoology, my teacher remarked that if you got rid of all multicellular organisms, and replaced nematodes (tiny little, multicellular worms) with points of lights, you would see the outline of every multicellular organism on the planet. Since nematodes are everywhere, it's surprising that the role of nematodes in the maintenance of 'normal' health hasn't been well investigated. So this NY Times magazine article about nematodes and Crohn's disease fascinating (all the more so since I just helped submit a proposal to study the effects of the microbiome on…

I Would Go With PacBio, But Not Because of Human Genomics

I guess. Over at the Motley Fool, Brian Orelli asks, "Which Is a Better Buy: Complete Genomics or Pacific Biosciences?" While I agree that PacBio is probably the better bet (and bet is the operative word), I don't think the reasoning is right. Orelli: If you're interested in trying to catch the boom and get out before the bust, both Complete Genomics and PacBio look like a good choice to benefit from an exponential increase in DNA sequencing. It's too early to make a definitive call, but of the two, I like PacBio better because I'm not fond of the low-cost, high-volume business model. Sure…

Dark Matter: A Ruling Theory with no Clothes?

Dark matter - that invisible stuff that is supposed to make up some 20% of the Universe - was thought up to explain a puzzling observation. The amount of mass we can see through our telescopes is not enough to keep galaxies from spinning apart. The existence of great quantities of hidden mass would provide the gravitational pull needed to form those galaxies and enable them to rotate in the way that they do. But not everyone is willing to buy the idea that the Universe is cloaked in "invisible cloth." An alternate theory, first put forward by Weizmann Institute astrophysicist Prof. Moti…

Shout Out to Fab Lab DC!

Shout out to Fab Lab DC for posting about the USA Science and Engineering Festival last week. www.fablabdc.org USA Science & Engineering Festival Festival Dates: 10/10/10 - 10/24/10 Expo on the National Mall: October 23rd and 24th, 2010 The Inaugural USA Science and Engineering Festival will be the country's first national science festival and will descend on the Washington, D.C. area in the Fall of 2010. The Festival promises to be the ultimate multi-cultural, multi-generational and multi-disciplinary celebration of science in the United States. The culmination of the Festival will be a…

Repeat this mantra every day: McCain is not a moderate maverick

As John said right after the last election: Besides picking our candidates and races, I think the most valuable thing most of could do is to help shape the conventional wisdom. We blog, we write letters to the editor, we talk up our relatives, neighbors, and co-workers. We should try to take down the straight talking St. McCain and the weak-on-defense Democrats narratives. It's never too soon to start casting doubt on the Republicans we plan to target; broken promises are the most effective critique. And, of course it's never too soon to start talking up the candidates we support.(bolding…

On Milosevic

Ten months later (this was posted first on March 22, 2006), he has a tenure-track position there. Not a bad idea to give a good talk at various places.... ----------------------------------------- I have to brag about my famous brother and at the same time provide you with some quality reading about Milosevic and Serbia. Feel free to tranfer the ideas to the USA, the victimhood of the fundamentalist Christians etc. First, here is an article about a talk my brother gave in Alberta the other day: Lecturer examines 'poisonous zombie swamp' of Serb politics and here is a little bit older, but…

Let's Just Hope There's No Lead in Your Toys Until 2010

The toy companies that moved their production to China in order to save money apparently didn't calculate the full costs of offshoring. Testing their products for lead is just too expensive, they argue. They have successfully lobbied to delay lead testing rules for children's toys. Joseph Pereira and Melanie Trottman of the Journal report: Under pressure from manufacturers, federal regulators have postponed for one year certain testing requirements for lead and other toxic substances in toys and other children's products. But unless Congress acts, retailers and manufacturers still won't be…

Kids' Book: Religion is Evilism

Check it out--for a mere 12 Euro, you can buy, Wo bitte geht's zu Gott?, fragte das kleine Ferkel, a book that is reportedly causing a stir for its depiction of the world's major religions. This children's book is pitched to atheists who wish to indoctrinate/inoculate their children against religion: The book tells the story of a piglet and a hedgehog, who discover a poster attached to their house that says: "If you do not know God, you are missing something!" This frightens them because they had never suspected at all that anything was missing in their lives. Thus they set out to look for…

Ben Stein sinking ever lower

Several people have notified me that this ugly mug is appearing in the ads on this site: Yep, Ben Stein is hawking "free" credit reports on my site. Only…they aren't free. They aren't useful. And Ben Stein is being an exploitive douchebag. A few points are worth noting here. First, the score itself is not very useful to consumers. What's useful is the report -- if there's an error on the report, then the consumer can try to rectify it. Secondly, and much more importantly, if you want a free credit report, there's only one place to go: annualcreditreport.com. That's the place where the big…

linkedy links xii

Atlas Hedged Bankrupt Icelandic gazillionaires and Woe Is Academia Atlas Hedged updating a classic for the modern age - recommended Peek-a-boo - the Economist explains why Astronomers should have lots of new toys. Check Out new SciBling "Confessions of A Science Librarian" PhysioProf's Handy Dandy Guide to D00dly D00d's - how fuckin' not to fuck up in comments on some peoples' blogs FSP explains why you should read the backlog of student e-mails before going to the last faculty meeting - have to get into the right frame of mind. Iceland: Lára Hanna interviews Michael Hudson on where…

Obituary: Rare Two-Headed Snake Dies

tags: We, two-headed snake, reptile, World Aquarium Leonard Sonnenschein, president of the World Aquarium in St. Louis, holds We, a two-headed albino rat snake. The snake came to the aquarium's attention when its previous owner distributed a circular offering it for sale days after its birth. The aquarium paid $15,000, knowing full well that most two-headed snakes don't live more than a few months. [larger] A rare two-headed albino rat snake, appropriately named "We," died this past weekend. The 8-year-old rat snake, the main attraction at the World Aquarium located inside the downtown…

More Discovery Institute bulldung on the way to my door

Supposedly, the Next Big Thing in the Intelligent Design creationism movement is Stephen Meyer's new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Meyer is wandering about the country, peddling absurd op-eds and flogging his book in bad talks. Here's a good summary of one of his presentations in Seattle: To sum up, Meyer's argument is as follows: (1) According to Bill Gates, DNA is like a computer program. (2) Because I am unfamiliar with the field known as genetic programming, every computer program I've ever heard of has had a developer. (3…

Rude and foolish Kansans

Kansas Citizens for Science has a troll who brought up a post of mine, and a reader asked for a clarification…so I made two short comments in reply. That prompted a comment here from someone named "Dave". Mr. Myers, at Kansas Citizens for Science we are fighting a tough battle to have the present school board replaced. When you, and Robert Madison who invited you over (and who is an outspoken atheist) link your atheism to science, going beyond anything science can provide, you are playing in to the hands of our opponents. The primaries here are coming up, and having atheists swarming our site…

Should you buy a hybrid car?

Last summer we were driving up north, in our Prius, and one of those coal rollers tailgated us for a while, then passed us. On the right. On the median. Jerk. When we were trying to decide whether or not to buy a Prius, last winter, I looked into the usual things one looks into. I learned from the internet and various people that we'd never recover the extra cost of buying a Prius, because they were so expensive. So I got a little information together and called a dealer. "I'm thinking of buying either a Subaru Forester to replace our old and beat up Forester, or a Prius. But I've been…

The Search for Noah's Ark

Yet again, some intrepid explorers are preparing to trudge up Mt. Ararat to find Noah's Ark: A joint U.S.-Turkish team of 10 explorers plans to make the arduous trek up Turkeys tallest mountain, at 17,820 feet (5,430 meters), from July 15 to Aug. 15, subject to the approval of the Turkish government, said Daniel P. McGivern, president of ShamrockThe Trinity Corp. of Honolulu, Hawaii. The goal: to enter what they believe to be a mammoth structure some 45 feet high, 75 feet wide and up to 450 feet long (14 by 23 by 138 meters) that was exposed in part by last summers heat wave in Europe. I'll…

DonorsChoose: Better Viewing for Students

Continuing the theme of highlighting the occasional particularly worthy proposal, have a look at "Better Viewing for Students", which pretty much encapsulates everything you need to know about the reasons for the fundraising drive. The proposal is asking for money to buy an overhead projector for classroom use-- not a computer projector, an old-school overhead. Why would anybody want that? Well, there's some educational jargon to justify it, but the real reason is here: What makes these needs more pressing is the fact that traditional teaching can not take place in my classroom. The…

What's the Next "Harry Potter"?

No, I'm not talking about Harry Potter books-- there won't be any more of those for a while, at least until J. K. Rowling decides she really needs to buy Bolivia. I'm talking about "Harry Potter" the cultural phenomenon-- the inescapable, endlessly hyped mass-culture Event that everybody talks about and obsesses over. The question is this: What will be the next "Harry Potter" style mass-culture phenomenon? "That's ridiculous," you say, "Nobody saw the Potter thing coming, so how could we possibly predict the next 'Harry Potter' scale phenomenon?" True enough, but think about this: The Potter…

New Year's Eve Lowering of the Opossum

I just sent out an e-mail to a bunch of friends asking what they were doing this New Year's Eve. We'll be at home in the City of Medicine drinking a bottle of 1997 Grongnet "Special Club" Champagne. Then I'll try to do a 8K trail run being held tomorrow at Duke Forest. Feel free to join me - I'll be the 151-year-old dead guy wearing these shoes. But in Brasstown, NC, (right at the NC-TN-GA tri-state border) they will be dropping the opossum - yes, the famed New Year's Possum Drop. It's a non-alcoholic family event that begins with a blessing and singing of church songs followed by the…

Live Earth disconnect

I promised myself I would go easy on the Live Earth spectacle, despite the easy pickings on the hypocrisy watch. But just how much can one skeptic take? Watching Sting admit he could do more to reduce his carbon footprint was one thing (ya think?), but the Pledge and the only "actions" being asked of those paying attention put me over the edge. On the one hand, my man Al Gore and his fellow climate action campaigners did work a policy goal of an international treaty that calls for a 90 percent reduction in "global pollution" by developed countries (50 percent for everyone else) into the…

Big time beast

Little Dougie (aka Ian Murphy) has hit the big time: he punked the Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, by calling him up and pretending to be über-Rethuglican puppet master David Koch…and Walker believed him and babbled like a little kid on Santa's lap. It's a self-aggrandizing embarrassment, with Walker bragging about how he was Reaganesque, that he was pitting stereotypical blue-collar workers against the unions, and how he has a baseball bat in his office that he'd use to enforce his demands with the Democrats. It's dreadful stuff, and when caught with his guard down it's very clear that…

Kittens, Aww, Wook at the Cute Wittle Kittens

Another contribution to Science in the Public Disinterest (see last contribution, on nanotech and golfballs): this one tells us about "Cat Lovers Lining Up for No-Sneeze Kitties." And I've got only one response: Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!!! By the by, Joseph at Corpus Callosum picked up on earlier reports of this, back in June, and it looks like "progress" is being made. I feel obliged to keep the desirous public in the know. Allerca, a smalll California biotech company, is making headway: Last month, an Allerca public relations consultant, Julie Chytrowsky, kept Joshua, an Allerca cat…

Data-free framing courtesy of Nisbet

Matt Nisbet has coughed up yet another post on PZ and framing. It begins: 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. As I pointed out: This is a little data-free, now isn’t it? No information on views "among the wider science community" and a link to a single comment by D.J. Grothe (who may or may nor be a leader "in the atheist movement"). As I said before, the issue here is not…

My thoughts on Nisbet

Apparently Nisbet thinks we should desist from pointing out what a fiasco this whole affair has been for the supporters of Expelled. Apparently he thinks this is helping the enemy. He also thinks Dawkins and Myers should return to their seat at the back of the bus. Perhaps that might be true about "new atheism" (and I have stated my views on that before), but this isn’t about atheism. It is about a dumb move that was made by Mark Mathis and the supporters of Expelled. It is about how they are spinning their stupidity through lies and mistruths. It is about how their dumb little movie twists…

SEED demands a post

...and they shall have one!! The question: How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?... Well the answer is... we don't!!! I'm definitely not going to be one of SEED's most prolific bloggers, but I would bet that most of us don't find the time, we make the time. Unfortunately this time may come at the expense of spouses, kids, hanging out with friends, exercise, fishing, whatever. So perhaps the better question is... why do we do it? I can't speak for…

A scientific excuse for why I gained weight working on my dissertation

It seems that if you eat on a full brain you are more likely to make poor eating decisions. So here's the schtick via Weighty Matters: Simple experimental design. Take 165 undergraduate students and enroll them in a study you tell them is about memory and where as part of their reward for inclusion, they'll be given a snack. Ask half of them to memorize a 2 digit number and the other half a 7 digit number and once they've memorized their numbers ask them to go into a second room where they are faced with their snack choice - either a piece of chocolate cake or a cup of fruit salad. Track…

Travie McCoy and Bruno Mars are crying.

In which I embarrass myself even more. You can download it here Lyrics: PhD (rewrite of Travie McCoy's "Billionaire") I wanna get my PhD so fricking bad Get all of those jobs I never can I wanna be on the cover of Science Magazine And all your future research will cite me Oh every time I close my eyes I see my name with letters on the side Oh call me doctor if you don't mind, oh yeah You'll see, my life will be complete When I get my PhD I would have an office of my own Where I can be alone, buy myself a nice chair Close my eyes and sit there You know, I'll prolly make my TAs do the grading…

Lawdy Lawd

We often forget who really did in New Orleans: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with its ridiculous projects like the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet ("Mr. Go"), which quite literally welcomed storm surges into the city. But you won't forget after reading Michael Grunwald's great feature in the latest New Republic. You need a subscription or something, but believe me, it's worth it. The article puts me in mind of lyrics by Mike West, a fantastic New Orleans singer songwriter whom I now suspect is displaced, in a song called "Corps of Engineers": there's been a lot of talk about widening the…

Ad placement does not constitute endorsement

One of the joys of being on Scienceblogs is getting to watch the ever-changing banner and sidebar ads that are placed by the marketing folks at Seed. Unfortunately, the people making the advertising decisions are not scientists, nor do they vet their ad choices with us before running them. So, sometimes we bloggers aren't so thrilled with what pops up alongside our writing. And right now, I'm not so thrilled with the ad for Bjorn Lomborg's book, Cool It! showing up in the side bar. Now, I'll admit that I haven't read the book, but what I've heard of it tells me that Lomborg has cherry-picked…