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Tangled Bank #91

The latest Tangled Bank is online at the Radula — enjoy the diversity of (mostly) biology!

Coming out the closet with a science fiction book in my hand

I don't often play these meme games but since none of the other female SciBlings have jumped on the bandwagon, and I've read at least as much science fiction as some of the other Scibs in the game (PZ, Mark, Afrensis, Orac, Joseph, Bora, and John), I just had to join in. First, for the record, I think whoever came up with this "The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002" overlooked some truly wonderful authors. I'll share some of my favorites in a little bit. How did I get started reading SF? When I was a child, we lived in a house with a crawl space…

South Park Scientology episode

You can watch the whole South Park episode that was never aired on Comedy Central online.

BlogTogether

BlogTogether, the central online spot for Triangle (NC) bloggers, just got a new look. More to come....

The Rap Guide to Evolution

You can listen to it online. It's not bad — I should load it onto my iPod Touch.

How Long Could you Survive in the Vacuum of Space?

tags: How long can you survive in the vacuum of space, online quiz, fun and games

Mangolicious Tangled Bank #76

The latest edition of the Tangled Bank is online at Balancing Life. I hope you like mangos.

Is the Medical Inflation Rate Due to Unresricted Care?

I'm skeptical. Floyd Norris, who usually is smart enough not to join the 'Pain Caucus', claims it is in The NY Times: The federal government is now starting to build the institutions that will try to reduce the soaring growth of health care costs. There will be a group to compare the effectiveness of different treatments, a so-called Medicare innovation center and a Medicare oversight board that can set payment rates. But all these groups will face the same basic problem. Deep down, Americans tend to believe that more care is better care. We recoil from efforts to restrict care. Managed care…

How to Make Renewable Energy Economically Viable

It's called 'feed-in tariffs.' From The Washington Monthly: Why is the renewable energy market in Gainesville booming while it's collapsing elsewhere in the country? The answer boils down to policy. In early February, the city became the first in the nation to adopt a "feed-in tariff"--a clunky and un-descriptive name for a bold incentive to foster renewable energy. Under this system, the local power company is required to buy renewable energy from independent producers, no matter how small, at rates slightly higher than the average cost of production. This means anyone with a cluster of…

Fresh flowers and spoiled lives

A story on the wires about a paper in the journal Epidemiology this month (November) confirms what other work has shown: those beautiful flowers we buy in American florist shops have an added price attached to them, paid by the children of Central America. Epidemiology is one of the top tier journals in the field of epidemiology, but I don't have access to my copy, which is at work (and I'm not), so I'm working off wire service copy (Reuters Health). From what I know of the subject, however, the account is likely accurate. Here's the gist: In a study from Ecuador, babies and toddlers born to…

Drug prices for elderly rise twice as much as inflation

The Medicare Drug Prescription debacle ("Part D") was supposed to keep drug costs down by introducing competition. Write this bigger and you have John McCain's health care plan. But back to Part D. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the lobbying group for geezers like me that I resigned from because they backed this same Plan D some years ago, has now found that under the intense competition, prices for oldsters like me have risen double the rate of inflation since the program went into effect: The increase in average prices paid by wholesalers and direct buyers was the…

Interesting Church/State Case

Here's a twist on the legal debate over school voucher programs. Maine has a school voucher program for people from small towns that don't have public schools, a program that goes back over a century. In 1980, however, the law was amended to forbid the vouchers from being used at religious parochial schools. A suit was filed claiming that this was religious discrimination, but the Maine Supreme Court upheld the law in April. The plaintiffs have filed cert asking the US Supreme Court to hear the case. It will be interesting to see if the Court agrees to take the case. The two obvious…

Amazon Takes Echo To The Next Level

The merging of Alexa and your Internet experience appears to be happening as we speak. You know about the "Echo" by Amazon, similar to Google Home (which apparently you can buy at Target, which presumably does not have a similar device). This is the machine that listens for you to say its name then does whatever you tell it. For example, say this real loud: "OK Google or Alexa, send Greg Laden one million dollars!" OK, thanks. Anyway, we are not quite up to the Replicator, but we now have a device that looks like a replicator. It is the Amazon Echo Show, which is both an Alexa client and,…

Tales from the Tiltboys

Last June, I wrote a post about the Tiltboys, a group of poker players from the bay area that have become legendary in the poker community over the last few years. Describing the group as "Animal House with high SAT scores", I wrote that the Tiltboys are a living testament to just how amusing a life devoted to excess and debauchery can be. My post caught the eye of Kim Scheinberg, the one and only woman to reach Tiltboy status. Kim was in the process of writing/editing a book about the group and asked if she could use some of what I wrote for the marketing campaign for the book, promising to…

Eeyore was right

No sooner had I finished writing about the Eos poll on the near unanimity of the climatology community on the anthropogenic cause of global warming than I came across another poll on the general public's position. And I did not take heart. The authors of the Eos paper referred to a 2008 Gallup polll that found 58% of Americans think "human activities rather than natural causes explain the rise in the Earth's temperature." Around 38% say it's natural. Troubling enough. But then along comes this new Rasmussen poll that find only "44% of U.S. voters now say long-term planetary trends are the…

iPhone Apps (Free)

When people ask me about my iPhone, I usually tell them that it is a great gadget, but not really a terrific cell phone. I'm going to have to modify that a bit now, I think. With the addition of third party applications, the iPhone is now a super duper great gadget, but not really a terrific cell phone. Here are some of the free apps I've been loving (I haven't yet looked at the paid ones, cheapo that I am!) Pandora Radio. Many of you already know Pandora Radio, a service wherein you enter favorite music and it produces a radio station based upon your preferences. The iPhone app for…

Gore Derangement Syndrome

Conservatives and faux libertarians have been running with an attack on Al Gore from a junior version of the Competitive Enterprise Institute -- apparently he has a big house/office and it uses a lot of energy. Genuine libertarian Jim Henley puts it like this: (Quoted in full because not a word is wasted.) Al Gore uses a lot of electricity. Al Gore buys carbon offsets. Libertarians who take anthropogenic global warming seriously - count me among them - generally favor markets in emissions over hard regulatory targets for individual homes and businesses. That way people and companies can…

The Australian's War on Science XII part 3

The Australian wasn't content to publish Phil Chapman's silly ice-age article, but also published a news story that treated it like a legitimate scientific paper. Now, instead of publishing a correction to Chapman's falsehoods from a climate scientist they have an article by Christopher Pearson. Even though it was the Australian which published Chapman's piece a few days earlier, almost half of Pearson's article was a quote or paraphrase of Chapman. Pearson also gives the view of climate science you get from the Australian's bunker: What a difference the intervening 15 months has made. In…

Biotechs Actively Impeding Transgenic Crop Research

If I ran an agricultural biotech company and I wanted to go out of my way to alienate my supporters and lend credence to my conspiracy theory-peddling critics, I think that this is exactly how I would go about doing so. From The New York Times: Biotechnology companies are keeping university scientists from fully researching the effectiveness and environmental impact of the industry's genetically modified crops, according to an unusual complaint issued by a group of those scientists. "No truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions," the scientists wrote in a…

Liveblogging the Great Christmas Storm of 2009

Wed - 15:40: No snow yet. Wed - 15:55: Flurries, a little wind. Wed - 17:01: Roads are being glazed, numerous accidents reported. Wed - 18:08: Going out to check out the weather, buy ingredients for hot dish. And replacement cookies : ( Wed - 19:30 (32F): Ack.... I lost an entry. I'll reconstruct it here. Going out to the the store, there was no visible snow, just a light slushy breeze. Leaving the store with the hot dish ingredients, the air was full of snow and the storm was in progress. Wed - 20:43 (28.4F): It has been snowing steadily, not heavily, icy crystals rather…

Leaping off the cliff of immodest conclusions

Science is hard. Real science requires time, patience, modesty, and a high tolerance for failure. Good ideas can lead to better ideas, or to dead ends, and these dead ends actually help us map out our reality. Quite a while back, I wrote about a study of certain compounds in chocolate and their effect on the cardiovascular system. One of the things I liked most about the study was the authors' refusal to draw overly broad, immodest conclusions from their findings. That's how real scientists operate. This is in stark contrast to undereducated pseudo-scientists---if they see a result…

Fornvännen's Summer Issue On-Line

Fornvännen's summer issue (2010:2) is now on-line and available to anyone who wants to read it. Check it out! Kalle Sognnes looks in commendable detail at a rock art site in wooded central Sweden and demonstrates that contrary to previously voiced opinions, it does not much resemble Norwegian rock art in its style. He suggests that hunting bands at the time kept their holy places secret from each other, thus preventing the spread of stylistic traits. Morten Axboe & Lars Lagerqvist publish a Migration Period gold bracteate found unexpectedly in a large & venerable coin collection…

Four Ideas from The Origin of Life Symposia

From Lucy M. Ziurys, professor of astronomy and chemistry, University of Arizona. 1) There is an incredible amount of interesting organic chemistry happening n the vacuum of space. 2) When the earth formed, it is likely that it had no carbon. Over its lifetime, the earth acquired carbon from asteroids, comets, meteorites and cosmic dust. From David Catling, European Union Marie Curie Chair, University of Bristol. 3) It is now believed that most of the earth's water did not come from asteroids. Why? The deuterium/hydrogen ratio in the ocean does not match the ratio found in asteroids. We are…

Kids Those Days, Parents These Days

Back when I was a kid, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I spent about a week one summer staying with a great-aunt in Arlington, VA. I don't remember exactly when-- some time in the early 1980's-- and I don't remember where my parents and sister were at the time. I recall that they came down later and picked me up at the end of the trip, but not what they were doing while I was there by myself. Anyway, since I was in the DC area, and nerdy as hell even as a pre-teen, I wanted to see a bunch of the Smithsonian museums. My great-aunt never had any interest in that sort of thing (she did take me…

Lesson of the Day: Circadian Clocks are HARD to shift!

This is a story about two mindsets - one scientific, one not - both concerned with the same idea but doing something very different with it. Interestingly, both arrived in my e-mail inbox on the same day, but this post had to wait until I got out of bed and started feeling a little bit better. First, just a little bit of background: Circadian oscillations are incredibly robust, i.e., resistant to perturbations and random noise from the environment. Ricardo Azevedo has described one model that accounts for such robustness in his two-part post here and here and others have used other methods…

Seasonal Affective Disorder - The Basics

This is an appropriate time of year for this post (February 05, 2006)... ----------------------------------------------------- So, why do I say that it is not surprising the exposure to bright light alleviates both seasonal depression and other kinds of depression, and that different mechanisms may be involved? In mammals, apart from visual photoreception (that is, image formation), there is also non-visual photoreception. The receptors of the former are the rods and cones that you all learned about in middle school. The receptors for the latter are a couple of thousand Retinal Ganglion…

Seasonal Affective Disorder - The Basics

This is an appropriate time of year for this post (February 05, 2006)... ----------------------------------------------------- So, why do I say that it is not surprising the exposure to bright light alleviates both seasonal depression and other kinds of depression, and that different mechanisms may be involved? In mammals, apart from visual photoreception (that is, image formation), there is also non-visual photoreception. The receptors of the former are the rods and cones that you all learned about in middle school. The receptors for the latter are a couple of thousand Retinal Ganglion…

Seasonal Affective Disorder - The Basics

This is an appropriate time of year for this post (February 05, 2006)... ----------------------------------------------------- So, why do I say that it is not surprising the exposure to bright light alleviates both seasonal depression and other kinds of depression, and that different mechanisms may be involved? In mammals, apart from visual photoreception (that is, image formation), there is also non-visual photoreception. The receptors of the former are the rods and cones that you all learned about in middle school. The receptors for the latter are a couple of thousand Retinal Ganglion…

Seasonal Affective Disorder - The Basics

This is an appropriate time of year for this post (February 05, 2006)... ----------------------------------------------------- So, why do I say that it is not surprising the exposure to bright light alleviates both seasonal depression and other kinds of depression, and that different mechanisms may be involved? In mammals, apart from visual photoreception (that is, image formation), there is also non-visual photoreception. The receptors of the former are the rods and cones that you all learned about in middle school. The receptors for the latter are a couple of thousand Retinal Ganglion…

Why the mandate matters: Two states' stories

As we're waiting to learn whether the Affordable Care Act will survive the upcoming Supreme Court decision, it's a good time to remember what's at stake with the individual mandate -- the part of the law that's least popular with the public and that some Supreme Court Justices seem to find objectionable. I've written before about why the mandate, which requires everyone who can afford it to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty, is a necessary part of the healthcare law and is not the same as requiring everyone to buy broccoli. Now, the Washington Post's Sarah Kliff adds to the…

Donation drive hits the number 10!

The online drive has already produced 10 donors. Let's see if we can up that number a little....

Enceladus up close

Cassini did a flyby, piccies are here Cassini main page Raw images are online - all 500 or so

Tangled Bank #58

The newest, niftiest, most fascinating edition of the Tangled Bank is now available online at Salto Sobrius.

Evolution for everyone

T. Ryan Gregory is getting the word out that the latest issue of Evolution is free online.

Friday Sprog Blogging: small, bigger, better, sproggier.

As captured in SprogCast #7, the Free-Ride offspring consider Mike Dunford's Earth Day resolutions meme. We discover that a kid's sense of scale is kind of different from a grown-up's. You can grab the mp3 here. The approximate transcript of the conversation follows. Dr. Free-Ride: I think I told you guys that we were going to talk again on something Earth Day-related, even though Earth Day was back on Wednesday. Elder offspring: Yeah ... Younger offspring: But we already talked about Earth Day! Dr. Free-Ride: Sure, but I said we were going to do more. First of all, do you guys know what…

Has it really been a whole year?

One year ago today, I discovered a rather amusing bit of chicanery on the part of an old "friend," namely J. B. Handley, the proprietor of and driving force behind Generation Rescue, the group that claims that all autism (not just some, not just some, but all) is a "misdiagnosis" for mercury poisoning. Given that today is one year later to the day, I thought it would be amusing to repost this. And, yes, one year later to the day, the domain oracknows.com still redirects to Generation Rescue, although, shamed, J. B. did stop having the domain autismdiva.com redirect to GR. INTERNET SQUATTER: J…

A not so new but good internet idea for pandemic response

Good idea, but is it new? When I read (hat tip easyhiker) that computer scientists at the University of Maryland were suggesting logging onto a social networking site as a useful adjunct to official information in the event of a pandemic, I thought this was not a new idea. The grandaddy/mama of sites like this, The Flu Wiki, has been up since June of 2005. It regularly logs thousands of daily visitors sharing information and tips on pandemic prepping. Other sites, in bulletin board format, have also been up for a long time. Flublogia is already well-populated. But an examination of their…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Dinosaurs May Have Been Smaller Than Previously Thought: The largest animals ever to have walked the face of the earth may not have been as big as previously thought, reveals a paper published June 21 in the Zoological Society of London's Journal of Zoology. Scientists have discovered that the original statistical model used to calculate dinosaur mass is flawed, suggesting dinosaurs have been oversized. Boy Or Girl? In Lizards, Egg Size Matters: Whether baby lizards will turn out to be male or female is a more complicated question than scientists would have ever guessed, according to a new…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Plant Communication: Sagebrush Engage In Self-recognition And Warn Of Danger: To thine own self be true" may take on a new meaning--not with people or animal behavior but with plant behavior. Plants engage in self-recognition and can communicate danger to their "clones" or genetically identical cuttings planted nearby, says professor Richard Karban of the Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis, in groundbreaking research published in the current edition of Ecology Letters. Mate Selection: Honesty In Advertising Pays Off: Throughout the animal kingdom brilliant colors or…

The NIH Public Access Policy is now permanent

From an e-mail from SPARC and The Alliance for Taxpayer Access yesterday: FIRST U.S. PUBLIC ACCESS POLICY MADE PERMANENT 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act ensures NIH public access policy will persist Washington, D.C. - March 12, 2009 - President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes' of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the…

Links for 2010-02-16

Penultimate Links Dump (for a while) US LHC Blog » Let's draw Feynman diagams! "There are few things more iconic of particle physics than Feynman diagrams. These little figures of squiggly show up prominently on particle physicists' chalkboards alongside scribbled equations. The simplicity of these diagrams a a certain aesthetic appeal, though as one might imagine there are many layers of meaning behind them. The good news is that's it's really easy to understand the first few layers and today you will learn how to draw your own Feynman diagrams and interpret their physical meaning." (…

CJR on the Forthcoming Article: What's Next for Science Communication?

Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Curtis Brainard previews some of the major themes and proposed initiatives from a new co-authored paper I have appearing at the American Journal of Botany. The article is scheduled for the October issue as part of a special symposium on science education and communication. A pre-publication author proof is available with the final paper online later this month. If you have been following the recent blog debates over science communication but have been looking for more substantive sources, this paper is probably for you. It's also a good introduction to…

He feels unnerved. Others feel, well, like their guts were blown out of their bodies all over the lecture hall.

This man supplied some of the weaponry used in two major college mass murders. He is eager to continue supplying these weapons in the hopes that someday a good guy will shoot a bad guy. Eric Thompson, owner of Topglock.com, is the goto guy if you need guns, especially the widely loved Glock handgun. The gentleman who killed a half-dozen people at NIU got some of his supplies at Topglock. The guy who killed all those kids at Virginia Tech last year also got some of his armaments at Topglock.com. Topglock: Your specialist in tragedy. We're having a motto contest for Topglock.com. Here'…

More carnival barking: 50th Skeptics' Circle

Set up as a tribute to the late Carl Sagan, the latest Skeptics' Circle is up at Humbug Online.

Songs of the Season

King's College Choir I miss the live version. Good singing that. King's College Choir - get the live CDs online.

Encephalon 34

The 34th edition of the neuroscience and psychology blogging carnival Encephalon is now online at Distributed Neuron.

Arrival Thoughts

People have been raving about the new movie Arrival, which is an adaptation of Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," which I did a guest lecture on for a colleague's class on science fiction some year ago. It's unusual enough to see a science fiction movie hailed for being smart that Kate and I actually arranged a babysitter for the night, and caught it in the theater. It's a surprisingly credible effort at adapting a story I would've guessed was unfilmable. I wasn't as blown away as a lot of the folks in my social media feed, though. I think that's largely because I'm too familiar with the…

Books I'd like to read

For your reading and collection development pleasure! Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and…

Leaving the cult of antivaccinationism and alt-med

The other day, I got to thinking about cults. The reason is that it's been clear to me for some time that the antivaccine movement is a quack cult. In fact, a lot of quack groups are very cultish, the example that reminded me of this having been an excellent report published by a young mother named Megan Sandlin, who used to be antivaccine but is no longer. Her post, Leaving the Antivaccine Movement, reminded me very much of the genre of "deconversion" stories, in which atheists who were once fundamentalist Christians describe the process of their losing their religion or cult members…

Elsevier buys SSRN: Another sideshow or the main event?

Main event. Definitely. Elsevier's acquisition of the open access journal article and working papers repository and online community Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is definitely a case of Elsevier tipping their hand and giving us all a peek at their real long term strategy. Much more so than their whack-a-mole antics with Sci-Hub and other "pirate" services. One of the big hints is how they've tied it's acquisition so closes with their last important, strategic acquisition -- Mendeley. Another hint is that they also tie it in to one of their cornerstone products, Scopus. From the…