jlynch | December 8, 2007
No, not a processed meat made from young dogs of African origin, but this:
My Name is Ronald Gigs, I and my Wife are on a Christian mission to Africa and we came along with our little Puppy Jenny. After a while we notice that the weather here is not good for the Jenny and we have not been able to take good care of her the way we always do because of our job. we need someone to adopt her and take care of her the way we always do. If you can take good care of her please get back to us because we really need someone to take good care of her.
And we hope you are also a loving person with a kind…
jlynch | December 8, 2007Births
1730 - Jan Ingenhousz, Dutch-born British physiologist and botanist
1795 - Peter Andreas Hansen, Danish astronomer
1874 - Ernst Moro, Austrian physician
1947 - Thomas R. Cech, American chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1632 - Philippe van Lansberge, Flemish astronomer
1779 - Nathan Alcock, English physician
jlynch | December 7, 2007John Stockwell (among others) has suggested that there needs to be a baseline with which to compare Behe’s productivity as a scientist. Stockwell suggested Sean B. Carroll and, as always, I’m happy to oblige. (FYI, I’ve omitted Carroll’s review articles.)
Couple of things are of note here. Firstly, and most obviously, Carroll’s publication record makes (Full professor) Behe look like a piker, especially when you consider that Carroll’s papers appear in journals such as Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Secondly, we see the predicted shift from first-author…
jlynch | December 7, 2007
Hawk Roosting
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.Inaction, no falsifying dreamBetween my hooked head and hooked feet:Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s rayAre of advantage to me;And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.It took the whole of CreationTo produce my foot, my each feather:Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -I kill where I please because it is all mine.There is no sophistry in my body:My manners are tearing off heads -…
jlynch | December 6, 2007
Events
1900 - Max Planck discovers the law of black body emission.
1972 - Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, is launched. The crew take the photograph known as "The Blue Marble" (above) as they leave the Earth.
1995 - The Galileo spacecraft arrives at Jupiter, a little more than six years after it was launched by Space Shuttle Atlantis during Mission STS-34.
Births
903 - Abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi, Persian astronomer
1810 - Theodor Schwann, German physiologist
1905 - Gerard Kuiper, Dutch-born American astronomer
Deaths
1978 - Alexander Wetmore, American ornithologist
1993 - Wolfgang Paul…
jlynch | December 6, 2007Over at this thread, a reader asked for Behe’s publication record in a similar format to Gonzalez’s. Glad to oblige. (As always, click for a big ’un).
Note how his productivity drops off hugely once he gets publicly involved with ID in 1991. Much like Gonzalez, Behe’s most productive period occurs just before he embraces design and from then on, its all downhill.
Update: Readers might want to contrast Behe's record with that of Sean B. Carroll.
jlynch | December 6, 2007DI "policy analyst" Logan Gage tells us:
Michael Behe does biochemical research with his University of Pennsylvania Ph.D.; Jonathan Wells does biological research with his U.C. Berkeley Ph.D.; Stephen Meyer researches the history and philosophy of science with his Cambridge University Ph.D.; etc.
Not quite. Behe stopped being a productive scientist a long time ago. Wells has published a total of three peer-reviewed papers in the thirteen years since he got his PhD, the last of which in the scientific equivalent of The Onion. Meyer - to the best of my knowledge - has never published a peer-…
jlynch | December 6, 2007
If only to prove I have too much time on my hands as the semester winds to a close ... here is Michael Behe’s peer-reviewed scientific output over time (again, click for biggie). Remember, friends don’t let friends who were productive scientists become ID "theorists."
jlynch | December 6, 2007Over at Neurotopia the peer-less Evil Monkey has posted an excellent entry on Guillermo Gonzalez and how his productivity as a published scientist dropped off significantly when he began his tenure track at Iowa State and how - based on this alone - he would have probably had a rough time getting tenure.
EM provided a graph to back up his points; below is a prettified version (click for biggie). Feel free to use in any posts you might make on this issue.
The total height of any bar is the number of peer-reviewed publications Gonzalez had in a given year. Red indicates those for which he was…
jlynch | December 6, 2007Births
1586 - Niccolò Zucchi, Italian astronomer
1778 - Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, French physicist and chemist
1863 - Charles Martin Hall, American chemist
1890 - Yoshio Nishina, Japanese physicist
1920 - George Porter, British chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1771 - Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Italian anatomist
1867 - Jean Pierre Flourens, French physician
jlynch | December 5, 2007Over the next few weeks I’m going to manually moving pre-2006 posts on Stranger Fruit over to this site. Longtime readers - or is that reader - will remember that the blog was hosted on my own server between January 2004 and December 2005 but disappeared into the aether after a database crash early this year. Remnants are, however, to be found on the Wayback Machine and I’m going to use those to recreate some of the material going back to January ’04 in an effort to give it more permanence. I’m going to have to do this manually, but that will enable me to just concentrate on the science and…
jlynch | December 5, 2007In the past I have discussed Jonathan Wells’ paper "Do Centrioles Generate a Polar Ejection Force?", the journal in which it appeared (Revista di Biologia), and its editor, Giuseppe Sermonti. Steve Matheson over at Quintessence of Dust has seen fit to comment extensively on the paper and how it has fared in the years since publication. Wander over and have a read.
(Hat tip to Glenn Branch)
jlynch | December 5, 2007Births
1855 - Clinton Hart Merriam, American ornithologist
1868 - Arnold Sommerfeld, German physicist
1896 - Carl Ferdinand Cori, Austrian-born biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1901 - Werner Heisenberg, German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1903 - Cecil Frank Powell, British physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1907 - Giuseppe Occhialini, Italian physicist
1932 - Sheldon Lee Glashow, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1624 - Gaspard Bauhin, Swiss botanist
1965 - Joseph Erlanger, American physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate
2001 - Franco Rasetti, Italian physicist
jlynch | December 4, 2007Births
1852 - Orest Khvolson, Russian physicist
1908 - Alfred Hershey, American bacteriologist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1123 - Omar Khayyám, Persian poet, astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher
1798 - Luigi Galvani, Italian physicist
1935 - Charles Robert Richet, French physiologist
jlynch | December 2, 2007Events
1904 - The Jovian moon Himalia is discovered by Charles Dillon Perrine.
1967 - A transplant team headed by Christiaan Barnard carries out the first heart transplant on a human (53-year-old Louis Washkansky).
1973 - Pioneer 10 sends back the first close-up images of Jupiter.
1999 - NASA loses radio contact with the Mars Polar Lander moments before the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere.
Births
1776 - Johann Spurzheim, German neuroscientist
1838 - Cleveland Abbe, American meteorologist
1842 - Ellen Swallow Richards, American scientist
1886 - Manne Siegbahn, Swedish physicist and…
jlynch | December 2, 2007As I stayed up late last night to watch Hawai’i stumble past a mediocre Washington team (who are last place in the Pac-10), I got to thinking. Sure, Colt Brennan is a very talented kid who has been able to work well with some good receivers, but the Warrior’s record of 12-0 is vastly overrated and not deserving of a BCS bowl slot. They took on a single ranked opponent (Boise State) but the rest of their schedule was powder-puff: Northern Colorado (1-11), Louisiana Tech (5-7), UNLV (2-10), Charleston Southern (5-6), Idaho (1-11), Utah State (2-10), San Jose State (5-7), New Mexico State (4-9…
jlynch | December 1, 2007Births
1885 - George Richards Minot, American physician and Nobel Prize laureate
1931 - Nigel Calder, British science writer
Deaths
1987 - Luis Federico Leloir, French-born chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1987 - Yakov Borisovich Zel’dovich, Russian physicist
jlynch | December 1, 2007The Territorial Cup is the oldest college football trophy game and the 81st edition of it will be played tonight at Sun Devil Stadium when ASU (#13, 9-2, 6-2) take on the University of Arizona (5-6, 4-4). Depending on the result (and that of other games), ASU could still make either the Rose or Fiesta Bowl, and seal their tenth 10-victory season in school history. UA are trying to snap an eight year bowl drought and are coming off three consecutive wins, the latter two of which (UCLA & Oregon) were games in which their opponents were largely without their starting quarterback.
Weather…