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evolgen | June 15, 2006Dr. Reed Cartwright has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation. Reed's a Panda's Thumb contributor and theoretical population geneticist. We'll forgive him for the second point, seeing as how he did have my academic grandfather as an advisor. The Panda's Thumb was the great inspiration for me to start blogging. I found a link to the website from EvolDir, and the rest was history.
I'm a day late on this. Some of us are still working toward that elusive dissertation and fall behind on things like blog reading.
evolgen | June 11, 2006Janet has tagged us with an irrational meme. Below the fold are 3.14159265 things about me.
3 reasons you blog about science:
To practice writing.
To organize my thoughts and force myself to follow the current literature.
There are worse ways for me to waste my time.
Point at which you would stop blogging:
When it becomes detrimental to my academic career.
1 thing you frequently blog besides science:
Man things: sports, beer, and sex.
4 words that describe your blogging style:
Ill-informed.
Obnoxious.
Immature.
Distracted.
1 aspect of blogging you find difficult:
Reading the articles and…
evolgen | June 9, 2006OMG, check out the new evolgen banner! You gots to see this. I'm totally ragging on the Discovery Channel advertisement (that's 'advert' for you on the other side of the pond). Me so funny. Me go, haha! Laugh. It'll only be up while the Disco Channel KRAKATOA ad (ie, advert) is running. Have a good weekend. Say hello to the newbies.
evolgen | June 9, 2006If all has gone according to planned*, the new version of the ScienceBlogs homepage should be up and running. Along with the new homepage comes a whole slew of new bloggers. Go on over and check it out. It should be totally awesome**.
* This is a scheduled post, so all may have not gone according to planned.
** I cannot guarantee awesomeness because I have yet to see the new page or many of the new blogs.
evolgen | June 8, 2006For the past few weeks, I have allowed commenters to post using their TypeKey account. I didn't want to require commenters to register with TypeKey if they did not want to, so I still allowed comments from unregistered readers. TypeKey allows me to authorize comments much faster, as I do not need to worry about spam coming from registered commenters. I can also tell the publishing software to trust commenters if they have a TypeKey account. I get an email notification for every comment, and I must manual approve all non-TypeKey comments. That's why non-TypeKey comments may take longer to…
evolgen | June 8, 2006Hsien at Genetics and Health decided it would be interesting to interview some idiot and post the answers online. The idiot tried his best to answer the five questions (no, not those five questions) posed to him, and you can either berate him for his answers at Genetics and Health or right here in the comments section.
evolgen | June 6, 2006The New York Times has a science blog. A science blog that I cannot access because I am not subscribed to TimesSelect. The Times wants readers to pay to read a blog. This is worse than a blog without comments.
(Via Complex Medium.)
evolgen | June 1, 2006Addendum: Older women who drink are smarter. Question is, are they MILFs or Cougars?
Scanning a few blogs that I rarely ever read, I came across a link to this post from this blog. The post is on Crooked Timber, and the link comes from the awesomely named Lawyers, Guns, and Money. The post starts out with some stuff about the falling birth rate in Europe, but then digresses into a discussion of drunkenness (which is carried on in the comments). It turns out there are people who have never been drunk. Ever. I do not know these people.
I'm wondering what fraction of my readership are members…
evolgen | May 30, 2006I should be working instead of dicking around on the ole' blog. But, give me a break, I just washed 600 vials. I needed a break.
After letting the new ugly banner and stupid name hang around for a week, I've decided it's time for an update. We're going back to being called evolgen (although you can still refer to us as Throatwarbler Mangrove). The slogan (or nickname, or catchphrase, or stupid saying that goes under the blog title), however, is...
You're gonna have to click through below the fold for that. This type of announcement doesn't get sent out over the RSS feed.
AT THE CONVERGENCE OF…
evolgen | May 29, 2006The meeting went pretty well (I may have more to say later once I've had time to digest everything). When I got to the airport on Sunday, I found out my flight was one hour late. I live in the middle of nowhere, so it's impossible to get a direct flight from the western or southern US. Long story short, I missed my connecting flight by about 5 minutes. These assholes wouldn't hold my plane for me -- they figured it was better to waste their money to put me up in a hotel and give me money for food than go a few minutes behind schedule. They also gave me a coupon for $100 dollars off my next…
evolgen | May 24, 2006If all has gone well, this post should appear as I'm on my way across the country to John Lynch's neck of the woods. The warmth of the desert should cause quite a shock to my system coming from the frigid north east. I may not have much access to the internets until next week, and I haven't scheduled any other posts. Evolgen is going dark for the next few days. If you have the urge to post a comment (on one of the old posts, I guess), log in with Type Key so that it can appear without my moderation.
While I'm gone, make sure the Frinkers don't steal any of my my jokes.
evolgen | May 23, 2006Given the inability of certain people to differentiate between evolgen and Evolution Blog, we're changing our name. This isn't like the last time we tried to rename ourselves. This is for real . . . and 4 eva. We are no longer evolgen. We aren't Evolution Blog, either, but we never claimed to be Evolution Blog (and we never claimed to know anything about evolution or blogging for that matter). I'm not sure who "we" are. It's always just been little old me. This name change is giving us quite a complex.
What's our new name? Well, if you're reading this through a newsreader or some other…
evolgen | May 23, 2006While procrastinating (I should be analyzing data for a talk I'm giving on Friday), I stumbled upon this site (via EDSBS, not StumbleUpon). I tried to bypass registration (using BugMeNot), but none of the cheat passwords worked. If you want to play around with the gadget, you may need to register, but you can use a fake email address (they don't require you confirm your registration).
What's this fun website? Well, you upload a headshot, and it returns a list of celebrities you resemble. I uploaded three different photos. To find out who I look like, click through below the fold.
Photo…
evolgen | May 17, 2006PLoS Biology has an article with data that supports the hypothesis that open access articles receive more citations than articles hidden behind a toll (summary available here). The author compared open access and non-open access articles in PNAS, controlling for any confounding variable he could think of. The article is open access, of course, so you should check it out.
My own exercise in open access -- publishing some original research on this blog -- has been put on the back burner as I take care of some other research. You can read the background here. The next step involves a bit of…
evolgen | May 16, 2006Don't expect much from me in terms of substantial posting. I'm getting prepared for the SMBE meeting, and devoting most of my time to finishing up some data analysis and putting together my talk. If you want to read about some evolutionary genetics research, here are some links:
Check out this report on genome duplications in angiosperms from Claude dePamphilis's lab (Indian Cowboy has more here).
I'm pretty interested in copy number variation, so I definitely need to read this article comparing copy number polymorphisms in humans and chimps (news release here). From the snippets I've…
evolgen | May 12, 2006I've been busy this past week (and I'll be busy in the next couple of weeks to come), so I don't have much time to post to evolgen. For this reason this week's Phylogeny Friday is a recycled post from the old site. Check out the comments on the original entry for some remarks from one of the authors of the paper I discuss. I'll try to get some original content up here, but blogging may be slow until the end of the month.
Now that we have entered the post-genomics era, with the genomes of most model organisms completely sequenced (as well as the human genome), it is up to genome centers,…
evolgen | May 5, 2006The grand overlords behind ScienceBlogs are asking us:
If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?
That's simple, atomic weapons. Not only for the damage they have cause, but for the perpetual state of fear they put us in because of the morons responsible for making the decisions regarding their use.
evolgen | May 2, 2006I'm trying to emerge from hibernation, and I'll hopefully have some good blogging material up in the next few days. In lieu of my own ideas, I'm going to link to what other people have written. Read them, because I ain't saying much right now. The list can be found below the fold.
Neil Saunders points us to this article from the BBC on a new function for "junk DNA". I hope Neil is right: "one day the term 'junk DNA' will fall into disuse."
John Hawks has a good discussion of a recent paper on inferring population size using mtDNA. Apparently cytoplasmic DNA is under selection, and that,…
evolgen | April 28, 2006Via Janet comes the ABC meme. To learn a bit about me, click through to below the fold.
Accent: None that I can detect. Of course, no one thinks they have an accent.
Booze: It depends on my mood -- I'll drink pretty much anything. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a good IPA, sometimes a thick stout, and sometimes a Miller Light. If it's wine, it's best if it's from Burgundy. As for liquor, gin is my perfect poison.
Chore I Hate: I agree with Janet; grading sucks.
Dog or Cat: I currently have neither. I have had both. Either one is good.
Essential Electronics: TV + cable box. Computer +…